


A Sticky Situation

by SingleWhiteCatLady



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: ABO Verse!, Alpha!Max, Beta!Dag, Beta!Toast, F/F, F/M, I promise, Mpreg, Omega!Capable, Omega!Cheedo, Omega!Furiosa, Things do make sense, Weird Biology, dudes with vaginas, ladies with penises, there should be an Explicit Sex tag, yes you read that right MPREG, you read that right
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:39:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6650692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SingleWhiteCatLady/pseuds/SingleWhiteCatLady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max shows up to the Citadel in the middle of a Rut... Things go downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Special THANKS to r3zuri for putting up with me while I wrote this.

ONE; Day 122 (Post Return)

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0

When she goes to sleep she isn’t thinking about him. Which, really, isn’t unusual. She thinks of him only rarely, and when she does it’s just the curve of his jaw, or the fear in his eyes as he’d hidden behind a muzzle and pointed a gun at her. 

She thinks of him less often than one would believe. Occasionally she’ll be down on the desert floor supervising the marketplace and think she sees him from the corner of her eye. Or she’ll wake from a strange, amorphous dream of him, damp between her thighs, but it’s never concrete. Never something she acknowledges when her eyes are open. 

That is until she wakes on the morning of the one-hundred-twenty-second day since the Revolution. It seems like any other day. She wakes, clears the dust from her mouth with a drink of water, dresses and shrugs on her prosthetic. She has two now, one is lighter and has a hidden knife blade on a spring in the wrist. The second is heavier, with gears and motors that when activated, can crush a heavy exhaust pipe between her steel fingers. Nobody has yet to test her enough for her to see what it can do to a man’s skull or windpipe, but she seems to be the only one eager to find out. 

She picks up her morning ration, a coarse, crunchy pastry filled with cheese, vegetables, and eggs, and heads toward the garages. 

She sees the unfamiliar vehicle. A buggy of some sort, the likes of which the Gastown Pole-Cats usually use, but without the pole rig on the back. It’s original make and model are indistinguishable. Something low and wide with an exposed engine and a cab that’s practically a steel box with a slit for a front wind screen. 

There are two pups sitting on the roof, both of them coated in dust and speckled across the chest with engine grease. Skin tanned and smooth but for a few small pockmarks from welding spatter. The smallest of the two is holding an electric torch, peering down between his knees into the engine, while the larger is bent forward with his hands on his knees watching whoever is under the car working. All Furiosa can see of them is a pair of boots. 

The garage cavern smells particularly potent today. Engines, and rust, and earth, and guzzoline, mixed with sweat. The childish tang of growing pups, mixed with the smell of Betas and stunted Alphas. Neutered, or unpresented because of toxicity, Furiosa didn’t know. Occasionally she’ll catch the scent of another omega. Rarely Cheedo, or slightly less rare, Capable. As far as she knew there weren’t any omega males in the citadel. At least none who’d yet presented. She held out hope that there were a few amongst the pups still too young to smell of anything but skin and salt. 

Joe couldn’t have used them all up. He’d abhorred male omegas—the last one she’d known to go through Joe’s vault had been held down and it had been cut off so the old bastard wouldn’t have to look at it. The kid had hung himself shortly after his heat had finished and Joe had brought him back into the vault to await confirmation of his Catch. 

That was before Angharad, before any of the girls who still lived. Before Furiosa if she wanted to be honest about it all. 

So, she hoped. Maybe the pup with the torch would be an omega. Maybe neither of them… Maybe they would be betas like Dag or Toast. Or maybe alphas like the man under the car. 

The smell was a surprise. She knew it. Felt it in her spine and her ribs and down both legs. It lifted the little hairs on the back of her neck and her forearm and made the scent glands below her ears itch. 

The man under the car stilled and she knew, down to the very core of herself, that he’d caught her scent. He remained motionless for a number of seconds, then shoved himself out from under the car with a frantic thrash and sat up on the creeper to stare at her with dilated eyes, lips parted so he could pull her scent over the pores in the roof of his mouth. 

The instinct to run, to defend herself was there, but the desire to chase, to catchbendtie—was not in his face. Instead he just stared at her, seemed surprised, or perhaps pleased that she was there. 

He scratched the skin below his ear with a wrench, coating it in his scent. 

Had he been anybody else she would have found the action deplorable. A claiming or marking of the item as his… From Max—He just looked confused and in need of a scratch and the wrench was there instead of his fingers. 

“You’re still alive?” She didn’t mean to sound so bitter.

His head tilted fractionally to the side and the hand holding the wrench dropped to his knee, shock and perhaps a bit of amusement flitting across his face and crinkled nose. 

“I think it’s the fuel line!” The pup with the torch said eagerly. 

“No! It’s a gasket!” The boy pointed; “See? He blew a gasket! There’s oil on the block!”

Furiosa nodded slowly, indulgently; “Are they helping you? Or are they pests who should be helping in the kitchens.”

“We in’t pests!” The smallest said, still holding the torch. “We in’t bein’ pests! Don’t send us to the kitchens, Fool! Don’t let her do it!”

Max was still staring at her, still breathing in her scent as if he wanted to lick it from her skin. 

She wasn’t sure if the stare made her uncomfortable… or made her want to pull his head to the side of her throat. 

“Uh-oh,” The larger pup said, straightening to pull at his younger friend; “C’mon… They’re getting that look.”

“What look? What’s goin’ on? Hey—What’s happ’nin? What look!”

“That look what means they’re gonna trade paint.” 

Furiosa saw a wave roll through Max, from the bottoms of his boots to the top of his head. Every little hair on his grease stained arms and the back of his sunburned neck stood on end. And his scent did a peculiar explosive rush right up her nose. 

Spicy and molten against her nerves, she could almost taste it. 

“Uhhh,” He made a hollow sound in the back of his throat.

She felt herself swallow a greedy flood of saliva. 

He pulled his knees up a little higher, tried to hide the growing bulge in his trousers.

Furiosa didn’t think she’d ever been around a presented alpha in a rut before. The alphas amongst the War Boys were usually neutered. Joe didn’t like the idea or the possibility of another alpha living in his world. How Max had made it through being a Blood-Bag without being neutered was a mystery. 

Maybe Joe hadn’t known… Maybe he had but it seemed a waste to damage a universal donor, especially when he could breed more. It wasn’t difficult to incite a rut in an alpha, Joe had potions and elixirs that did it—or claimed to do it. Sure made him stiff, that’s for certain. 

Why had Max come back when he was obviously in rut?

He fidgeted uncomfortably. Tried not to look at her—his cheeks became slightly red in a way that had nothing to do with the sun on his skin—

Oh.

OH!

“Come back looking for a lay?” 

He scowled, didn’t look at her directly, focused somewhere above her left eye.

“We don’t do that anymore, you’ll have to go to Gastown—Hear there’s a brothel there—“

He shook his head. “Engine trouble.”

“Sure… Has nothing to do with you being in rut. Ruts turn everyone into knotheads. What makes you think you’re different?” 

He looked at her. Cold and heavy where his gaze in her memories had always been soft and warm, if a bit fragile. 

“I’m a knothead?”

She lifted her chin defiantly. 

He shook his head and sprawled himself back across his creeper, slid under the car again.

She warned Cheedo and Capable away from the garages. Felt her skin prickling whenever her back was turned, like she was being watched. By the end of the day she could feel sweat pooling at the small of her back under her shirt and belts. Felt tension in all her bones and an itch across her throat and thighs. 

She ate her midday ration as quickly as she could and disappeared into the gardens, looking for some kind of breeze. It was too hot inside. Too humid. His scent lingered on her clothes like blood.

She worked on the greens until the sun hit the horizon and everyone was streaming inside like a tide for the evening meal. 

She found Max in the kitchens sitting in the corner with sweat on his brow, a group of boys and Mothers around him practically oozing lust. The Mothers were displaying their ample bosoms, the boys—who she realized were nearly all betas— were arching their backs, bent as they were over the table, practically presenting themselves to be mounted. 

Max was chewing his porridge slowly, blinking lazily—looked almost dazed.

Was someone under the table? She bent her head to the side to peer under, but found nobody. Just the casual sprawl of his knees and feet. 

Damn him.  
His eyes met her and he lifted his brows in greeting, turned back to the group.  
Capable was sitting a few tables over watching with an amused look on her face. Furiosa took up a seat between the girl and the Alpha and Capable’s eyes sparkled in mischief. 

“Ooh,” She grinned; “Are you the reason he’s got that dumb look on his face?”

Furiosa blinked at her slowly, felt something hot like rage building in her gut; “What?”

“He came in here a bit ago… kind of staggering like he’d been drinking-- you know, like the black thumbs do when they’ve been at the Hel Water.”

Furiosa eyed him. The flush to his cheeks, barely visible under the dirt and tan. The glassy look in his eyes. 

The little beads of sweat on his brow and upper lip. The scent of him— inexplicable under sweat and engine grease. Something just— just GOOD, that made her ACHE and itch under her skin in want of it. 

His nostrils twitched and his head turned before his eyes, barely a second of a delay, but enough that Furiosa felt the urge to look away before he could see her. But as much as her mind screamed, her body wouldn’t respond— not in the way she wanted. 

He looked at her. 

She looked at him.

Furiosa felt heat bloom low in her pelvis. Felt a stir of want—

Max still looked dazed, flushed, but his eyes were suddenly clearer. Focused solely on her. 

She felt crushed—SEEN in a way that was at first, less than pleasant. She remembered watery pale eyes and bubbling breath. The smell of decay and sickness crushing down on her, pain and wrongness—

For the first time in at least four-hundred days, Furiosa felt something in her belly, high under her ribs, clench tight and her body tingled. She knew—had learned to dread it. FEAR it—fear the weakness and vulnerability. Sweetling… They’d called her at first. ‘Just lie still now Sweetling, and it won’t hurt as much. You know you want it, look how slick you are!’ Bag of Nails came after that.

Max was staring at her, lips parted, drawing in the air—air slowly going thick with her scent. 

She fled. 

Shaking and scared, she fled. Ran across the sky paths and through twisting hallways. Snarling at any face that turned to her. Flesh hand tight on the knife she kept at her belt. Ready to defend her life. 

But nobody tried her. The only alpha she came across was stunted. Turned to regard her with curiosity, but no intent. The boy had likely been neutered at a young age, before he fully presented, or had never presented at all. 

She hid herself behind locked doors in her quarters. Soaked a cloth in Hel Water and pressed it between her legs to kill the scent, ground down against her fingers and the burn of the alcohol. 

Of everyone she’d expected to slip into heat with Max’s proximity, she hadn’t believed it could be her.

Capable, maybe. The girl hadn’t had a proper cycle since the Run. Cheedo, most likely. She was due for her heat within the next two weeks, she would likely be shut away by Dag as soon as word spread that Max was there and in Rut. 

Some of the once Milkers, definitely. Their bodies were still cleansing themselves of the chemicals and hormones Joe had fed them for years to keep them lactating. Hell, maybe one of the unpresented boys in the garages would slide over. 

But, Furiosa had not expected to be the one stuck on the cusp like this. 

If she could ignore it. If she could separate herself from his scent, maybe it would go away. Maybe her body would lock down again as it had before and leave her with two or three days of frustration and fever but no true Heat. 

Maybe this was her own body finally regulating, food free of chemical additives, body allowed to uncoil from the stressed knot she’d kept herself locked in for ages. 

Maybe this was like the stories she’d heard as a youth. Syncing. Two people so compatible biologically their very chemistry moved to fit with one another. 

Another betrayal, that’s all it was. All it could be. All Furiosa would let it be. 

She dipped a finger in the Hel Water and rang it in each nostril, eyes watering at the uncontrollable burn, hoping it flushed the lingering tang of his scent from her senses. Gulped down a few mouthfuls for good measure and flattened herself on her bed. Breathed slow and deep in hopes of chasing it away. 

She fell into a fitful doze, woke to Toast knocking heavily on the door. “Furiosa—Furiosa, we’ve got a situation.”

Alpha. There was an alpha in rut in her city and who knows what he’s done while she’s been asleep. 

The ache in her loins has intensified. When she sits up she’s damp with slick—pads the crotch of her second pair of trousers with folded rags, the top most soaked in alcohol, and rubs her exposed skin with it, swishes a mouthful around her teeth and tongue and swallows it. Takes a deep breath before she pushes away from the sink and exits the room. 

It’s not what she expects. 

“They found him this morning in the main bays,” Toast holds open the door to the clinic and Furiosa almost chokes at the wave of his scent that rolls out—like a physical wall. 

It smells wrong—soured. Bitter. 

Amita and Triumph are standing over him, Amita holding a fluid bag—the likes of which Furiosa remembered being hooked to once, not as long ago as she would like, to induce heat. The fluid in this one isn’t milky, it’s clear, water maybe? She didn’t know. It flows out through a tube into a needle hitched into Max’s inner arm. 

His skin is pale, but his face, chest and neck are almost too red. Skin dry save where Triumph is rubbing him with a wet cloth. 

“What happened?” Furiosa stands by the door—won’t let herself get too close. 

“Dunno,” Triumph says, voice pitched low as she works; “Hyperthermia… Just can’t figure what’s caused it. Did he seem off to you when he arrived?”

“No—No, he’s in rut though, could that cause this?”

Triumph turns to regard her with narrowed eyes; “You going In?”

Furiosa feels herself blush Trust the only female Alpha in the place to scent it. “It’s nothing… Just a partial—Could his rut have caused this—the hyperthermia?”

“He’s not acted like he’s in rut—but I can’t deny the smell of it.”

“Maybe he’s fixed?” Amita says solemnly. 

Triumph hums, catches Max’s waistband and pries it up, peers below and shakes her head; “Nope… Maybe he’s suppressing.”

“They can do that? Alphas can suppress?” Toast has her nose crinkled up a little.

“Used to be able to—I don’t know if it’s still possible,” Triumph rewets her cloth; “Not something I have to worry about anymore… Go see what you can find in his gear. Anything unusual.” 

Toast nods and darts off. 

Furiosa wants to object, to say it’s not their business to be going through his things—but she can feel herself starting to leak steadily now. 

“It’s not just a partial, is it,” Triumph cocks up an eyebrow at her; “You’re actually going In.”

“I can handle it. It’s just a reaction—“ She doesn’t mention it’s the first ‘Reaction’, including partials, she’s had in almost five years.

Max stirred on the bed, a whine and a toss of his head. His hips rocked against the inside of his trousers. 

“I’m going to go help Toast—“

“In your condition?”

“I can handle myself.”

“I don’t doubt it. But heat does things to you… You can’t always fight it off when your body wants it. Even if you don’t.”

“I can handle it.”

Triumph meets her eyes, doesn’t blink; “Don’t send any stunted Alphas up here with stab wounds when they start fighting… Last thing we need is a hoard of knotheads running amok hopped up on his scent.”

Walking was torturous. Every step and her flesh slipped a little against itself. Her clit throbbed, and the low itch deep in her pelvis grew until she was pressing her thighs tighter and tighter together on every step in an effort to scratch it. 

Toast was deep in Max’s new car, pulling everything out of hiding and pawing through it, sniffing packages and sachets. Found a little pouch of seeds that she said smelled ‘herbally’ like that ‘stuff’ Dag crushed and rubbed under her ears to make herself smell awful to Alphas and nosy betas. 

There was a plastic squeeze bottle of goo, it was slightly greenish. Toast squeezed a bit onto her fingertip and touched it to her tongue, span and hacked and cleared her mouth of the foul taste; “Algae! He bottled up Bullet Farm Algae!” 

Furiosa put the bottle aside, but her mind wasn’t on the algae, whatever that was, it was on Max. Max lying up in the clinic fighting a fever and whatever had caused it. Shivering and panting and weak—whimpering and mindlessly wanton—the heave of his breath in his chest, the red flush of his cheeks, and the plush width of his lips. The trapped length behind leather and—

“Furiosa, are you alright?” Toast’s hand felt like a branding iron on her arm and Furiosa found herself leaning hard into the driver’s seat, nose pressed into the cushion on the headrest, breathing in the scent of Max’s unwashed hair and sweat—the heel of her hand pressed hard against the mound of her sex, legs tight—

Alright.

Yes. Yes, she was fine. She was going into heat, but she was fine. She could do this. 

Toast tossed a crumpled shirt forward and just the stir of it through the air—just the hint of him lingering on it—

She was not OK. 

“I have to go—I—I have to go,” She shoved herself up, fingers like claws—made it halfway down the hall before she realized she had Max’s shirt in her fist, pressed tight to her chest like a prize. And she was locked in her room and shoving at her trousers before she realized how much of a bad idea it was to have the scent of him so close while she touched herself—

She snarled and kicked the shirt across the room, collapsed on her bed with her trousers still caught around one foot, one boot off, legs spread wide as she rubbed—couldn’t reach any sort of relief or even the shadow of orgasm, not with the knowledge that his scent was so close—that she’d taken it with the intent to bury her face into it while she shoved fingers into herself—

A fist thumped hard against her door; “Furiosa!” It was Triumph. 

“Go away!”

“Furiosa, it’s Max—We—we found it! He’s been eating hops. I don’t know where he got them, but he’s been eating them—Too many from the look of things… It’s not bad in small quantities, but he’s—he’s poisoned himself with them.” 

“Hops?”

“We used to brew beers with them before you were taken… It’s like a sedative. His heart’s beating irregularly. We’ve got the fever down, but if—if we can’t get it worked through his system it could damage his heart or kill him.” 

And what do you want me to do about it? She almost said it, felt the taste of it on her breath, in the urgency between her legs. 

“Furiosa… We need a place to put him until his rut’s gone. He can’t have any more of this herb. Not for a long while, and he’s going to wake up soon. We can’t keep him in the clinic!”

Bring him here, I’ll deal with him. She rubbed hard against the nub of her clit, bared her teeth. 

“Where can we put him where he won’t hurt himself or someone else?”

She sat up with a snarl, glared at the door, at the shirt in the corner, down at the slick coating her thighs and fingers. Where to put him… Where was a safe place, able to be locked, where he couldn’t hurt himself or others?

“There’s a room… At the top of the garage tower. It locks from both the inside and the outside. There’s a window small enough to get your arm through, but not enough to climb through…”

“How do you know this?”

“I used to hide there… It’s safe.”

Triumph didn’t say thank you, didn’t say anything else. She’d got what she was after. 

Furiosa laid back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Blinked stupidly and threw her arm over her head. 

Serves him right. Come here in rut and put her In. Stupid alpha… knotheads every one of them. She snarled to herself, pressed her legs together tightly. He could suffer. He could suffer up there alone with his hands and his knot and his greedy, slavering mouth—

She rolled to her hands and knees, rocked her hips, kicked against the restraining tangle of her trousers. Fought with the straps of her prosthetic. 

Damn him… 

She hid her face in her pillow and willed herself to sleep. 

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


	2. Day; 125-133

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is much smut in this chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SMUT AHEAD!

TWO; Day 125

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0

She woke thinking of him, covered in sweat, aching and hollow between her legs. Her first instinct was to fight—anyone and anything in reach. Tear and bite and rip. 

But there was no one there. She stilled. Breathed in and out and forced her heart to slow. Heat was more frustrating the first two days or so, especially ones that just sprang up like this. She remembered back when she’d used to have healthy ones… There were stages. She’d be ravenously hungry for a week before it started, eat anything and everything she could get her hands on, then during she couldn’t eat much more than a few bites before she was hot again. After she was just tired, slept for a few days and woke feeling damned near euphoric. That lasted about two weeks, sometimes three, then she’d get angry, manic, sad by turns, and bleed. It was always heavy. Clots and red—so much of it she’d bleed through any kind of padding she could find. And everybody would look at her, so sad and disappointed and she would rage at them. Then everything would even out as the bleeding stopped. And six months or so later it would happen again. 

But the first two days—the Cusp, after she’d started leaking, all she’d want was to be touched, all over, all at once. But now—after Everything—touch was a threat. Touch was a punishment. There were no people here she trusted enough to touch her the way she liked. The way that made her feel good, not feel like a thing to be used. 

It was frightening. That she was so vulnerable. Any beta or stunted Alpha in the city was a potential threat. They may have pledged their loyalty to the Sisters and Brothers. May have been peaceful so far—but she’d been amongst their ranks before. She knew what their kind had done to the rare, unfortunate Wretched that went into Heat. She’d seen the bruises, and bloody terror filled faces. She’d smelled the fear— Seen the bodies. 

She could lie here alone and touch, pinch, and rub all she liked, but it would just be disappointing and frustrating. She could never relax enough, never arch her back in the right way to give fruit to her ministrations. 

She could lie there and masturbate for a week solid and not once pull herself over. Not with the memories of force in her mind. Not here, in this bed. 

Valkyrie had once. She’d pressed her face between Furiosa’s legs and her fingers deep and made the heavens explode. Furiosa remembered—childish as it had been. Valkyrie had shared her frustration, and the elders had thought their union strange. A beta and an omega, but hadn’t protested, had mourned when Furiosa’s blood came down. She’d been taken before her next heat and there was nothing left of it. 

There was no one here Furiosa trusted. Not implicitly. Not really—No one but Max, and he was in rut. And Ruts couldn’t be trusted.

Could they?

She would hate herself—hate Max too—if she went to him and he turned out to be like the rest. He’d given her hope, not so very long ago, that the world wasn’t always as cruel and unusual as she’d believed it to be. Had he ever even touched an omega before? Or was his knowledge of them based on fireside stories, and boasting from traders with rotted teeth and poison ideals. 

She threw herself out of bed and cleaned as much slick from her body as she could, rubbed herself down with Hel Water and padded her crotch with a few more rags. Didn’t bother with her prosthetic because the buckles and her belts seemed unforgivably complicated and constricting when her skin was so sensitive. 

She found Triumph in the clinic. The place smelled strongly of spirits, cleaned. It was fairly empty. A pup or two and a few girl children washing this or that, flicking water at one another. 

Triumph stood with her on a balcony beside one of the sky walks, where the cool wind eased the burn in Furiosa’s flesh. Listened, and gave her advice. 

“You told me once, that he was reliable. Is that still the case?”

In her heart the answer was yes… But her mind was at war with her body. 

“Rut doesn’t change a person here,” Triumph tapped her chest with a curled finger, “Just like heat doesn’t change a person. You’re still wary, and angry—always walking with your fists clenched. Even as a baby you had a fist for anyone who threatened you.” 

Furiosa turned her eyes downward, spotted some of the people below moving things around while building another house. Mud bricks and sun shades. 

“It’s a question of your wants… And his. If he’s not OK with it, it’s just as much a violation as what’s happened before.”

“Is he lucid?”

“Mostly… he’s been sleeping since we got his fever down.”

Furiosa nodded, pushed back from the railing.

“What if you catch?”

Furiosa hesitated, shoulders sagging; “I don’t… I thought once I had… But—“ 

Triumph nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” She rubbed the sweat from her palm onto the leg of her trousers and walked away, felt Triumph’s eyes on her back clear across the sky walk. She didn’t turn to look. 

0-0-0

Nobody stopped her. There was a guard at the end of the passage, but they let her pass without incident. A precaution, to keep the boys away from him. As Triumph had said, it wouldn’t do to have a bunch of stunted alphas hopped up on Max’s scent. They’d go into a frenzy. 

The room was just like she remembered, a heavy steel door set back into a niche with a heavy bolt lock above and below, deep into the stone. It was the same on the inside door. She’d only ever locked herself away infrequently. She’d not been regular since she’d been stolen from the green place. Stress, she’d been told by Ms. Giddy. Stress can cause an Omega’s body to do strange things. Spontaneous heats were most common. A defense mechanism, remnant from the first ages Before, when being something inviting, when tempting a potential captor’s lust to slake their rage was more important. A conquering Alpha isn’t going to kill something he could breed with. 

Maybe that’s what this was. She’d gone into a Stress Heat…

No… 

No. Because Cheedo had gone into Stress Heat on the Run and Max hadn’t touched her. Nux hadn’t touched her. 

Damn it all…

She unlocked the door and pulled it open, gave the inner door a gentle push, to test the locks, and felt it swing inward unimpeded. 

Max’s scent had been in the hallway. Low, barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. But inside. Inside it was thick, heavy and warm—so warm. Only holding a hint of the bitterness from the herbs he’d been eating. 

He was lying on his back, on a pallet someone had dragged into the room. It was wide, thin, likely stuffed with hair and chicken feathers. His arms were spread out wide, as if tied at two points to opposite walls, and his right leg was bent outward. 

He looked almost as if he’d been punched hard in the chin and knocked unconscious, then just left to lie there. 

Still and breathing slowly. 

Asleep, Triumph had said. He’d been asleep for a while. 

She wanted to go closer, but forced herself to stand still. Triumph was right. She couldn’t just go over there and use him to make herself feel good. That would make her just as bad—worse—than anyone who’d done the same to her. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat; “Max?”

He didn’t respond. 

“Max.”

“Hn?” He tossed his head in her direction, eyebrows up, face relaxed. Didn’t open his eyes. 

“Are you awake?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you here?”

He let out an explosive breath, annoyance, and pried his eyes open. Stared out at her tiredly, but with growing interest as her scent permeated the room. 

She didn’t know what to say. How do you ask an alpha who is in Rut if they want to mate with you? She had no experience with this. Even with Valkyrie, she’d just appeared as if drawn. 

“Oh—“ His voice shook, eyes shining; “Oh—“ His hands trembled, reaching—

She pushed the door shut behind herself, worked the lower bolt and approached slowly, nudged his left foot with her own to see if he would spring up and grab her, but all he did was stare up at her and whine, a growing lump forming in his trousers. 

“I’m not staying… I—Do you want me to stay? Do—Do you—Are you OK with this?” She could feel slick pooling between her thighs. 

“Please—Oh, please.” 

“Are you just saying that because you’re in rut, or do you—“

“Fury—“ His voice shook and his nearest hand lifted toward her, shaking—

The next thing she knew she was kneeling over him, bent forward with her elbow on the pallet by his head, just running her nose against every crease in his neck she could find. Felt his fingers on the back of her neck, light but curled with restrained power. 

His mouth was hot—soft against the dips of her collar bone. His breath pulled against her skin. 

She shivered and her body melted against his.

He tasted salty, with the rare bit of earthy grit. His clothes still damp from sweat. She couldn’t remember if she’d pulled his jacket off of him or if he’d been lying there without it when she came in. She noticed things between kisses, between the rough drag of his fingertips against her nape and the length of her arms. The scratch of his chin between he breasts as he laved at the front of her throat. 

Her body sang, every nerve burning with the brush of his skin. Like the sun, scorching her from the inside out. 

“Max—“ She pressed her face into his throat and breathed in; “Max—“

He growled deep in his throat, a wordless question.

“Are you OK with this?”

“Yesss,” His body arched up into her and she threw a leg over his hips rubbed the damp crotch of her trousers against his, rode the wave his body became up and up to touch the sky and back to the earth in a cool slide. His hands tightened in her skin, eyes fluttering shut, lost to the sensation. 

She groaned, flattened herself atop him, chest to chest, her pelvis pressed into the soft flesh above his genitals. Rocked against the solidity of him because the fiction—the stretch of his body between her thighs was familiar—but so different than anything she’d ever experienced. 

The sigh of his breath, and desperate whine of his voice made her feel powerful in a way her sex had never allowed her feel anything more than vulnerable. Maybe it was because he was still suffering from the effects of the herbs, maybe it was just who he was. Willing to let her lead, willing to give her what she didn’t know she wanted, just by letting her choose. 

His fingers bit into her hips, not to restrain her, not to force her close, but to feel the movement of her, his chin lifted into her kiss, not to control, or mock, or punish, but to share his taste. She caught one arm, then the other, and pinned them beneath her knees, jerked his head back by his hair and buried her face in his neck.

He groaned, body going lax and pliant, lips pulled at the edges into a grin.

Ideas began to form in her head. Wants and desires she’d never allowed herself to entertain. Pleasure where she’d only ever experienced humiliation. 

“I’ve always wondered,” She said against the skin of his throat, “What it feels like.”

He was barely able to string two words together. “What?”

She ground down against him roughly; “What it feels like—“

He pulls back a bit, tilts his face up and forces himself to breathe, shakes his head to clear it; “To rut?”

She nods, “Every alpha I’ve known acted like it’s the greatest feeling… I’d kind of like to know what I’m missing.” 

He shivers, hips jerking up into dead air behind her. “You’ve never,” He looks down at her crotch, hidden so behind damp fabric. “Never pulled one off?”

She wrinkled her nose; “I don’t have a knot, idiot.” 

“Don’t need one, you just…” He swiped his tongue over his lips, breathed in sharply between his teeth to draw in more of her scent—whined with it; “You have to get out.” 

“Out?” She blinked. “You want me to leave?”

He whimpered, shook his head repeatedly, rolled his hips up, arms straining where they were pinned biceps twitching against the insides of her knees. “No—no, don’t go. Don’t go—“ 

Furiosa looked down at him with her jaw clenched. “Then what do you mean ‘out’?”

His eyes fluttered and his head tossed on the pallet, urgency bleeding into his voice. “Your—your Push. Just—“ His lips rolled back from his teeth, head jerking in the other direction, body undulating upward in need. “Just let it out, yeah?”

“I don’t…” She shook her head, “That isn’t how it works for Omegas, Max.” 

He snarled. Thrashed and it was the most violent she’d seen him since the Revolution. She clamped her legs around him. Rode out the motions of his body until the pressure of her on his ribs forced the air from his lungs and he stilled, panting helplessly to regain it. “’does…” He slurred; “Jus’ jus’ gotta work up to it,” His eyes were tilted down again, head lifted, hungry—staring at the apex of her thighs. “I can show—“ His eyes shot to her face, wide and almost ashamed. He whimpered; “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry—“

“What? For what? What is it?”

He shook his head, body shaking, and tried to pull his hips away from her. “I did that—I made you—“ He choked, shook his head. 

She sighed, felt the heat in her own veins continuing to build. “It’s not your fault—“

He shook his head, tried futilely to buck her off once more; “’shud’ntve—“ A whine, “shudd’ov stayed’way. “I can’t—I can’t do this. I can’t make you—“

“You didn’t know this would happen. It just happens,” She tried to convince herself of the same thing, but it wasn’t working. It was biology. Dynamic… Fate, or whatever other bullshit you wanted to call it. She didn’t care. “Hey—HEY! You’re not making me do anything.”

His head shook again, even as he reached for her; “Pups. You’ll—I can’t do that to you—“

“I can’t get pregnant… They’ve tried. I’m infertile.”

He stared at her.

“No pups. Just us—Just… just you and me,” She clamped her flesh hand to his jaw, forced him to look at her. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be. Heat or not… But, do YOU want me to leave?”

He shook his head frantically, rolled his hips up at her searching for friction; “Don’t go—please—please don’t—“

She had no idea if he meant it or if he was just so far gone—Hormones too heavy, the air too thick.

There was no potential in this, it was probably the only reason she’d let herself come here. The idea still made her nervous—but it was dangerous for him, especially when he’d been drugging himself. She couldn’t get pregnant. She wouldn’t be bound, wouldn’t be forced to say ‘yes’. She could leave him lying there and go back to her own room alone and deal with the heat as she always had before, pillow clenched between her knees, or fingers covered in slick— Frustrated and hollow and angry.

She was here because she wanted to be, and he was here because he wanted to be. He’d come here because of the engine trouble, but he could have just as easily parked somewhere, rode out his rut, and then come in. The car still ran. It still drove. 

He was here because he wanted to be. 

Maybe not in this exact room… But, in the city.

“It’s OK—I’m not going anywhere,” She combed her fingers over his head. She was starting to shake, the wetness of her body beginning to leak through her clothing. 

This—He was OK with this. It could happen. If she wanted it to happen it could. Would he be gentle? Would he be like everyone else when she got her clothes off?

His head thrashed on the pallet, hands twitching under her shins, pulling toward his body trying to touch her. 

She shuddered, head dropping back on her neck, and lifted up enough to let his hands get between them. 

He moaned, hefted himself up onto his elbows, and pressed his mouth to her skin, hands moving rhythmically against her thighs, kneading the thick muscles, plucking at the fabric of her trousers. 

He lifted his eyes, dark and burning where they lit on her face. Pressed his chin up searching for her mouth. 

Her weight settled over him and he collapsed back, hands pulling at the back of her waistband, urging her silently to help. 

She wasn’t aware of it, rolling off of him long enough to kick her boots off and skin out of her pants, the rags she’d padded her crotch with flying in every direction, wet with slick and need. 

The next second she was on her back, legs spread wide and he was low between them, one big hand hefting her leg up over his shoulder and then two fingers were parting her, rubbing firmly back and forth between her slit and her clit. 

She jerked, moaned, and ground down against his fingers in need. All fear and wariness that he may try to hurt her, or might not know what he was doing, blasted out of existence. 

He growled, pressed his mouth to the scent gland under her ear and sucked hard against it while her nails dug in hard to the nape of his neck. She snarled, her hips rocking urgently, back and forth, pushing away from his fingers, then forward against them. Teeth sharp against his neck. 

His thumb moved again, firmer, a press in against the skin forward of her slit, rubbing upward against the engorged nub of her sex. 

Out, he’d said. She could come OUT. 

Valkyrie had been able to come Out. It had seemed like magic. Alpha women came Out, looked practically indistinguishable from alpha men when their Pushes emerged. She’d never known an Omega to do it. Didn’t really think it was possible.

The pressure in her abdomen and clit grew, like climbing the stairs to the gardens, higher and higher. Every stroke, every pass of his fingers against the delicate, slick skin between her thighs brought that pressure closer and closer to some kind of crisis. 

“Relax—Let it out…”

She’d been aroused before during heat, had reached points near this while grinding against her palm or the firm twist of a cushion, felt heat and tension building and building until her heels had drawn up close and her legs had strained wider and wider, sweat in all the creases of her skin—as if at any moment she may tip over an edge into something apocalyptic—something that would make her thrash and bite and tear with her nails for the exact opposite reasons she had in her past. 

She strained against it, body too sensitive, to hot, hand clamped around his wrist to try and pull it away, hips arched up, tilted, head thrashing against the pillows—

He dug his thumb in one last time and drew it upward hard and the tension followed it up, coiling in on itself—

She wanted to say that it hurt, like that indescribable sensation of a muscle pulling tight into a cramp, but it didn’t—oh, it didn’t hurt. It felt incredible, all that tension, all that need and pleasure building up into a singular point.

She pulled in a lungful of air like a storm gale. Eyes squeezed shut hand leaving his wrist to tangle in his hair and draw his head toward the pinnacle of her want. Smashing his face as he pitched forward, into the slick apex of her thighs. 

He groaned like the world was collapsing in on itself and his mouth was so hot, stubble rough and lighting all her nerves on fire. Tongue a burning brand that struck deeper than flesh, following the same path his fingers had taken from the leaking wet core of her between her labia and against the growing flesh easing its way out of her body. 

She had no words, pulled him tighter against her with a wordless cry, pushed her pelvis up against him as the tension continued to tighten, as if it intended to turn her wrong side out. Thighs clamped tight to either side of his head.

His hands retreated, caught her hips and tried to pin them to the pallet but she bucked from his grip even as he left bruises shaped like his fingerprints on her waist and thighs. 

He growled, lifted his head and sank down on her, hollowed his cheeks and SUCKED. 

The world whited out for a moment and she choked on a scream, clamped her teeth on her lower lip and tasted blood. 

His hands were on her ribs, his head lifted, prickly chin resting against the soft, scarred skin of her inner thigh. “Fury… Shhh, sorry—I’m sorry.” 

She pried her eyes open, felt wetness on her cheeks and fought for the strength to lift her head and stare down at him—For a moment she didn’t recognize the sight of herself, there was something pink and wet and red tipped protruding from her mound. Not quite the length of her hand, but substantial enough that it scared her for all of ten seconds. 

Out, he’d said… She could come Out if she felt good enough. 

She wasn’t sure she liked it. It brought back memories of pain and humiliation and awfulness… The threat of having something forced into her because her body was wet, therefore she had no right to say ‘no’. Memories of Valkyrie when they’d been so young—too young. Softness and the gentle awkward press of their bodies.

But Max was just looking at her, hesitantly rolling his hips against the pallet, face flushed and wet at his chin and lips. Lips pink and parted, mouthing at her skin in need. He looked at her, eyes blue and hopeful, pleading—

Is it good? I did good? Is it OK?

He swiped the tip of his tongue over his lower lip, gathering the tastes of her— shuddered visibly, gooseflesh rising on his arms. “If you want…”

Want? Yeah… She nodded. Want what? Yeah… Sure. What does she want?

His eyes fluttered and his hips made a slow, hard push against the bedding, lower lip pinched between his teeth. 

She could smell his arousal, felt it in the sinuses between her eyes and in the roof of her mouth. Like the spice in Nadia’s soups. Heat and savory flavor she had no way to name. 

He lifted himself to his hands and knees and loomed over her and Furiosa’s body arched, curled itself—hips grinding, legs wide, heels pulled toward her pelvis. She whined in want of friction and fulfilment. The ITCH deep in her body unsatisfied and the TENSION of her push overwhelming. 

But he didn’t do what her body expected. He didn’t yank his trousers down and shove himself into her. Instead he rolled over onto his back at her side, bare feet against the bedding and worked at the closures of his leathers. Freed himself and pushed his trousers over his hips. 

He was comically pale beneath them. Flesh marked here and there with scars, some silvery, some angry red or showing signs of past infection. It was his knee that shocked her second, mangled and pitted. The skin thin and stretched over misshapen bone. It still looked like a human knee, in the most relative sense. But just looking at it hurt deep in her gut. 

The first thing that pulled her attention however, was the obviousness of his erection. Heavy and flushed it bobbed against his thigh, seemed to lift and twitch with every breath and heartbeat. She’d heard stories of alphas with monstrous cocks. Two fists wide with a knot the size of a child’s head… Of course, she’d never seen an alpha naked, so she had no idea what to expect.

She peered at him curiously, then down at herself, found the shape very similar, but where her own was smooth and seemingly seamless, his was larger, the texture of his shaft more deeply veined with a prominent red cap leaking profusely in his want. The skin at his base seemed loose, though already showing signs of filling out. 

Joe had looked nothing like that. It was both a relief and another bit of horror she could say she had endured and overcome.

He glanced at her and flushed visibly, hands rubbing up and down the length of his own thighs nervously. “I…” He cleared his throat; “’haven’t done this in… ahmm, long time.” 

She swallowed a strange dry feeling in her throat, pushed up onto the elbow of her left arm to look down at him, lifted her hand carefully, eyes on his, but didn’t touch until he’d swallowed and nodded. 

His thighs were dusted lightly with coarse little hairs, just half a shade lighter than the few on his chest and around the weight of his sex. His skin was hot and soft and shimmering with sweat, her finger glided easily upward from his knee and she watched the length of him twitch the closer she got, another gob of white bubbling out to slide down his length. She caught it with the pads of two fingers and traced down his length to the globes of his testicles pulled in tight to his body. Smooth and easy sliding around under the skin. Natural… Part of her wanted to giggle, because they looked a little absurd, but at the same time she wanted to put her mouth to them so she did neither.

He twitched, fingernails digging into the meat of his thighs, breath caught in his throat— And he cocked his right leg up and let his knee fall toward the edge of the pallet. 

She stared for a moment, unsure exactly what he was doing until his fingers moved again, nudged against her own to guide them lower where the skin behind his balls separated. 

He wasn’t very slick there, but when her fingers moved against the fragile skin and found his opening she could see the wetness of it. She touched and his whole body jerked, head tilting back, nostrils flared in search of air. 

She’d known men had openings as well, just as female’s apparently had shafts. But she’d never known an Alpha to acknowledge it, the few she knew of anyway. 

This woman—this omega woman, she assumed, that Max had had forevers ago—had she touched him here? Had he let her? Had she even wanted to?

Furiosa pressed her fingers against him again, spread them to peer between his folds. He wasn’t as big there as she’d expected. Not nearly as big as she was. Maybe, she rationalized, it was part of the deal. Alphas had big dicks and knots and small vaginas… Omegas had small phallus, no knots, and larger fertile vaginas.

But no matter the size of it, it seemed just as sensitive as her own because when she brushed one fingertip against his slit he shuddered bodily and pushed up against her hand, his own curling around his shaft and SQUEEZING. 

“You—ah—you’ll have to…” He lifted his other hand and made a trembling twisting motion with two fingers pressed together, “’doesn’t get slick like yours.”

Oh.

OH. 

“You’re OK? With me…” She looked emphatically down at her hand and back to him. “Doing that?”

He swiped his tongue over his lower lip again. “You w-wanted to know what it felt like… Thought that’s what you wanted.”

She shook, felt the tension of her… Well, there wasn’t any other way to describe it. Her Push—growing higher. 

Could she do that? Put herself into him there? What was she supposed to do if she did? How did—Did it ever feel good for the other person when you did that?

“Will you be OK if I do?”

He bunched his brows and stared at her as if she were speaking some other language. 

She tried again; “Will I hurt you?” She peered down at herself, still found the protrusion alien and almost unsettling. 

He shuddered and his hand stilled for a fraction of a second on his cock. “’always hurts a little ‘first time.” 

“You’ve never done it like this?”

He shook his head.

“You’re OK with—“

He rolled his eyes and carefully drew his left leg up, feet on the mattress, knees tilted outward. “Yeah… Yeah. Come on.”

She moved, pulled her legs under her—and found herself acutely aware of the blunt protrusion of her body. It—it ACHED. Itched, and seemed to throb with need. Her legs felt fluid, an uncomfortable pressure when her thighs got too close together. 

It was like that moment she’d reached before when all the tension in her body and pelvis seemed to gather but always disappointingly dissipated. Left her frustrated and exhausted but unable to still the restless want of her body. 

If what Ms. Giddy had told her about the last male omega to go through Joe’s vault was true, it was no wonder he never tried to arouse his wives to this point. Never tried to make sure their breedings were comfortable or in any way enjoyable for anybody but him. 

Dicks were weird!

She sat there against his hip and touched the engorged length of herself for the first time, felt a shocking quiver of PLEASURE race from where her hand connected deep into her pelvis and down into the slick walls of her womb. She made a startled noise but was unable to release herself. Touched gingerly and watched Max’s fingers moving on himself—matched his rhythm until she could feel her slick dripping down her thighs and wetting the sheet below them. 

Max’s right hand moved, slid between her legs from behind and played gingerly through the heated folds of her, one finger sliding in just enough to give her an awareness of it, just a question.

She rocked down against his hand eagerly, feeling that maybe—maybe Max could scratch that insufferable ITCH. Did he itch like this? Deep inside? Is that why he was doing this? Letting her climb between his legs?

And what legs they were—thick and muscular even beneath the pallor of his skin and the twisted lines of scars. The little hairs on his calves and thighs tickled her waist and hips and she shuffled closer on her knees. Lined herself up against the side of his arousal, gave a few aborted, uncoordinated thrusts into the crease of his thigh and groin, just to acclimatize herself to the motion. 

He chuckled, a low earthy sound and she wanted more of his voice, bowed forward and captured his mouth as if she intended to drink the essence of him in.

The hand not stroking himself with the remains of her slick cupped the back of her head and pulled her into the kiss—Softer, less demanding than any she’d suffered through before. He didn’t try to shove his tongue in, which she appreciated, but his lips were eager and his breath was hot and she wondered if that would be different if she asked him to show her as well. 

He rocked his hips impatiently and lifted his right leg to hook over her hip in an attempt to draw her attention downward again. It worked, and she turned her focus to the heat of him once more.

He hummed when she rocked back onto her knees, hand disappearing between her legs and scooping a cupped palm of slick forward. He groaned and shuddered and shivered when she pressed her fingers to his opening and threw an arm up over his face, legs tensing on either side of her. 

“Max?”

“Hnn?”

“I can stop if—“

He worked his tongue over his lips, as if still searching for the taste of her, didn’t lift his arm away or look down. The hand on his cock flexed, squeezing and releasing; “Just… slow.” 

She took a deep breath for resolve and rubbed her fingers a little more firmly against him, his body wasn’t so different from her own. Bigger and smaller in places, the flesh of his folds thinner and smaller, not as soft, not nearly as slick on his own. He would tell her if he wasn’t enjoying it, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t just lay there and let her do as she pleased while he floated away over the dunes in his head… would he? She lifted her hand away, swallowed past a stone like dryness in her throat; “Are you with me on this?” 

He didn’t say anything at first, the knot in his throat bobbed as he swallowed; “If I look at you right now I’ll come.”

She blinked, “And that’s bad?”

His body gave a little shudder and he shifted his hips restlessly, hand tight on the base of his cock. He whined, and it took extreme effort for him to lift his arm away from his face. His eyes were wide and dark—pupils dilated.

He smelled of want and arousal and intensity far beyond what Furiosa had ever experienced from another person. He didn’t say a thing, but she knew, just from the look in his eyes and the way his body rose to meet her as she lowered herself over him. His hand on her shoulder to offer extra balance as she pressed her abbreviated arm against his chest and reached between them to hold him open enough to align her push. 

It wasn’t an easy, frictionless slide. He wasn’t naturally wet enough for that, and it didn’t seem like she’d got any more than a finger length into the unfathomable heat and clench of him than his nails tightened into her skin. 

She stopped, body gone rigid and frozen as discomfort pushed through the pleasure on his face. 

“Max?”

He inhaled deeply and nodded, fingers flexing against her shoulder. “’m fine… Go on.” 

“’s it hurt?”

No. Hurt wasn’t the right word. A sting, maybe. A strange awareness of that place? Definitely. Stretch that was just the wrong side of easing tense muscles. Yes. Was this what Omegas felt?

He supposed it wouldn’t be as bad for Omegas. They got beautifully slick while he’d never been able to produce more than enough to ease in a finger during his own, much younger explorations. There wasn’t much up in there anyway, Alphas never really had anything spectacular behind the weight of their balls. Small, thin, stunted organs his body would slowly reabsorb as he grew older, leaving only a blind passage that would eventually dry up with the rest of him. 

Might as well enjoy it while he could, yeah? 

But… maybe it was too late? Maybe there wasn’t enough back there to enjoy? Just to ache and sting and pinch like something had been torn. Like when he bit the inside of his mouth while eating. 

“Should I stop?” Her face was open, controlled, even though he could feel the excited trembling in her limbs, smell the heat on her, and the want in her skin. Could feel her body shifting, desire and curiosity as she discovered this world of pleasure she’d been denied. 

He shook his head, lifted it to peer between them, but the bulk of his dick was in the way and he couldn’t see much but the puddle of white he was leaving on his stomach, and the growing bulge of his knot. 

She pulled out anyway, went back between her legs for more slick and touched him again. He flinched, felt the warmth of it as she eased two fingers in, the tenderness of himself deep inside as she painted him wet with it. 

And how wild was that? She, who hadn’t been shown a scrap of kindness with regards to mating—was making sure he was comfortable. Ensuring he wouldn’t hurt, even the smallest bit. 

That was her slick in him, he would smell of her for days. Not just this coupling, but the others to come—Oh FUCK, they were going to do this again! And again and again and againagainagain. She smelled of heat and he of rut and they were together in a locked room with food and water enough to see them through and she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t want to be and—

Part of his hind brain screamed and roared MATE CLAIM MINE! MINEMINEMINE! And he arched into her touch, felt a hard twitch and spasm go through his body from the base of his spine to the back of his neck, fingers convulsing. 

If she let him—oh, please let me—he would be coated in her slick and locked with her soon. No pups—no fear of the potential of it. Just the two of them—They could have one another. He could see her face slack and flushed in pleasure, the sinuous arch of her back as they were tied—

The hectic flutter of her lost to climax—

Max.

“Max?”

He was sitting up, hands on her, pulling her tight against his chest, face pressed into the scent glands under her ear, laving at them with the wide flatness of his tongue. She tasted salty and spiced and when he pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth he could smell sweetness in the back of his throat. 

He throbbed, tilted his head and offered the side of his neck to her, felt the shudder run down her spine as she bowed her head and breathed in deeply. Little jolts of thrusts against the borrowed slick of him. 

IN. ININININ!

She wedged her hand between their chests and pushed him back, a renewed tension at the small of her back and deep in her pelvis. Her push ached. Throbbed in time with her heart. She’d had a taste of the constriction of his body, the heat and scent of this small, intimate place, and even though his scent was clouded by her own now, she wanted. Could barely focus as she held the folds of him open and butted the bluntness of her push against him, slid away once-twice, but the third time found home and pressed her hips forward. 

The added slick helped, eased some of the friction. Her hips snapped forward and his head fell back with a gasp, body gone suddenly tight, legs clamped around her hips. One of his hands delved between them, an incredibly tight fit and pressed, fingers parted around the girth of her, trembling a little. 

“Sorry—“ She sucked in a lungful of air; “Sorry, I—“

But his fingers shifted, holding himself open and his other hand curled around his cock, fingers shaking and tight around the growing bulge of his knot. His nose was scrunched, mouth open—eyes shut tightly, sweat stood out on his brow and neck and chest—salty and thick with the unique scent of him. He urged her on with the crook of his right leg, heel pressed into the back of her knee, pulling her closer. 

She went, pressing in until the bones of their hips met and she felt suffocated by the extraordinary heat of him. She wanted to still, to allow him a moment to regroup, but her body wouldn’t listen—neither would his and her hand tangled in his hair, pulling him up into a kiss as her hips drew back and forth—awkwardly the first half dozen times or more, but smoothing as she found a rhythm his body seemed to mirror. 

His hand moved between them, stroking up and down, pausing every so often to give his growing knot a squeeze, body curling into her own, trying to draw her close. Heavy legs on each side of her hips pinning her to him. 

She felt empty, swollen and hot. The itch inside her indescribable, unbearable. The tension built to a terrible height and she wanted—felt more frustrated by the hot, tight clench of his body than relieved by it—tore her mouth from his and rubbed her face against the side of his neck, braved her teeth against his collar bone because he wasn’t giving her what she wanted and part of her was feral for it. 

He moaned, high and helpless, hips shoving up against her own urgently—The hand holding himself open shifted, shoved down farther as he practically doubled up—hand twisted—and shoved three fingers without hesitation up into her. 

Something snapped inside her, some little tension quickly released, throbbed twice—three times rapidly from deep in her pelvis up through her push and womb, but it wasn’t enough—wasn’t nearly enough.

He flinched, made a sound of discomfort for his wrist and arched. Snarled and the taste of him changed in the air—Grew dark and wild and his fingers twisted up hard inside her, a fourth popping past her rim and—His fingers spread wide—

Hear head knocked back hard on her neck and it happened completely without her awareness. She gave a sharp shout, hips snapping hard forward and her body went into spasm. She felt a gush of slick between her legs, over his fingers, her body clenched down hard and she dug her nails into his ribs, drawing blood. 

The itch exploded, grew and grew and toppled, like the burst of a sand storm. Heat and swirling pressure. Her body clenched five—six—nine times in rapid succession, all the while behind it the itching returned, lifted and crested again. Another rapid convulsion from within her and for a moment she blacked out in shock of it, body arched up and back, heels drawn like magnets toward her hips, knees outward—

“Easy—Easy, breathe.”

Her skin felt hot—too hot, she writhed against the mattress, eyes still closed, skin damp with sweat, legs and sex wet with slick and need. 

She groaned, thrashed and reached toward him with sharp curled fingers. 

“Shhh,” Max passed a wide flat hand down her body, from chin to clit—retracted and over sensitive. She snarled and kicked in his general direction, dragged her foot back up to help push her pelvis upward. “Maaaaax.”

He groaned, petted a wet hand through the hair between her legs and eased two fingers in, rubbing as if he intended to work her push out again. 

“Take it easy…” He whispered—sounded so close—Oh, he smelled so good. 

She reached blindly for him, found his face and shoved three fingers into his mouth, curled them and caught his teeth and lower jaw, pulled insistently even as he whined at the rough treatment and followed, crawled over and nuzzled into the heated core of her. Growled and speared his tongue deep into her. 

The stubble of his face stung and she rapped him hard in the kidney with her heel, the fingers that had been in his mouth now in his hair, curled like claws, grinding her hips up against his chin and mouth and nose, not caring that he couldn’t breathe. She wanted. She WANTED dammit!

He forced himself up with half a gasp and followed the tug of her fist, rumbled deep in his chest and pressed himself over her, the hot bulk of him rubbing against the softness of her. 

She could feel the protrusion of his knot, wider but not full. He hadn’t come—

Fuck—She snarled and tried to throw him off, writhed and tried to pull him closer, yanked his head down and mashed their lips together, tasted herself—salty and musky on his tongue. Sweet against the back of her throat. 

He could barely get words out between the demands of her mouth and his; “Can I? Can I?”

When he rubbed between her folds again she tilted her hips and the tip of him caught, sank in and after that things were beyond his ability to control. 

She snarled at first, wrapped both legs around his hips and pulled him in with the crush of her muscles. 

She was hot and wet and it seemed so effortless. He had almost forgotten how it felt—He groaned, drew his hips back and pushed in again, found a little bit of friction when his expanding knot pressed at her entrance. Her labia a warm cushion around the top of it—Oh, he wanted to be swallowed completely. Wanted that harsh CLAMP of her body—Wanted her writhing and clawing in mindless pleasure beneath him. All it would take would be a harder push—just a little shove—

“Max, I—“ 

He pushed, testing it—but felt her go tense, felt the undulations of her body still so he eased back—enough sense still lingering behind the haze of rut to tell him she was afraid. Had she ever been knotted before? Had any of the others, how many and who he had not asked, tied themselves to her?

He lifted his head and looked down at her, body still and saw the realization in her eyes. Realization that he was inside her and if they continued once they were truly lost to their hormones there would be no preventing what their bodies would do. What they would say. 

He passed a trembling hand over the short bristles of her hair, “I won’t—“

Her hand came up, still smelling heavily of her own slick mixed with the scent of himself, brushed the backs of her knuckles against his jaw. Her legs tightened, urging him on and he went, felt the slow stretch of her body, the hot puff of her breath against his face, her brow tilting into his own—

She gave and he slid in— His head dropped, cradled in the curve of her neck and shoulder, pulled the scent of her over his tongue and the roof of his mouth, groaned because her legs tightened around his hips, heels pressing into his thighs. 

They rocked together slowly, no more long fast thrusts, but slow grinding motions as his knot fully expanded and his body went abruptly tense, holding deep as he shuddered. A quiet preview of what was to come, she knew. Clung to him as he worked her up to another explosive marathon of spasms, body locked tight around him, pinning him to her more intimately than she could have imagined. 

He whined with every little climax, ground his hips against her helplessly—and as much as alphas were revered for their strength and prowess, he was undeniably vulnerable like this. She could hurt him if she forced their bodies apart. Hurt the both of them with some wrong movement, or too hard of a upward thrust—

Instead they seemed to merge, huddled against the pallet. Tied and shuddering, trading slow gentle kisses and tasting the others’ scent from their skin. Leaving little trails of bruised teeth marks across collar bones and shoulders, scratches all down their backs and thighs. 

She vaguely remembered coming untied, the slick gushing mess that came out as he withdrew and dropped bonelessly beside her panting. How still and relaxed he’d looked as he fell into an exhausted sleep. 

She was already restless again, memory of that glorious tension finally toppled. Wanted to feel it again and again and again. That itch finally scratched. 

She slept, woke to him rocking urgently against her hip, eyes glazed. 

She could go. He was still sleepy enough that she could leave and that would be the end of it. Once her heat and his rut were over that would be the end of it—

But she didn’t go. She rolled toward him with a whine and an urge deep in her chest to pin him to the bed with her hips and mouth. 

He growled, bared his teeth in a way that could have been threatening, but looked at the same time hysterical because his hair was standing up in every direction and he had the dark mark of her teeth on the center of his throat. 

She tilted her chin up in challenge, bared her own teeth and dug her nails into his chest, bent to force her head against the side of his neck, grazing the skin with the sharp points of her teeth 

There were moments between the waves when one or the other had enough sense to fetch food and water from the pile made by the window. They would sit pressed to one another, only half interested in sustenance between kisses and nips of teeth on tender flesh. 

Furiosa could remember instances, positions. On her back with his hands bruising her hips, moments before his knot expanded, the desperation in their voices matched. Pleading, harder-harder. There-theretherethere oh FUCK! Tumbling, weightless orgasms that left her clinging and writhing, building as he rocked his hips. 

Face down on the pallet with him arched over her back, snarling into her ear how wet she was, fuck—scraping his teeth down her spine. 

Her body hot and pulled tight with one of his big hands between her shoulder blades, holding her down while his hips shoved forward and back. The friction of rapid motion, too fast for her body to continue its overproduction of slick. The burn of his knot popping in and out then sticking—too big—her body locking down on it. Screaming herself hoarse into his hand, and the sheet, and the air so scented with their sex. 

Him on his back, quivering and helpless as she bounced on his hips, pulling up just a little too far on his knot until his eyes widened in primal fear and he yanked her hips back down. Pleading. Stay, don’t go—don’t go. 

Him pressed face first into the bed while she tried to coax her push out again—failing, and finally working fingers into him, working him up into soft, spent orgasms before his dick was recovered enough to harden. 

Finding little smears of brownred on the sheet beneath all the slick and cum and marveling at them, pressing him onto the sheet on his back and licking the tenderness from that small, stretched place between his thighs, murmuring of his virtue, how tight he’d felt—how pretty he’d looked speared open on her push—

His snarl as he pulled her up and worked her out with his fingers and tongue, straddled her lap and sank down with barely a wince. Guided her hand around his knot and pled—begged for the squeeze of her strong fingers. His face—Open and flushed, lips swollen and parted when she pulled and squeezed an orgasm out of him—the surprise when she could feel his body clenching—The rush of her own release—The grin on his face as he rolled off and buried his face in the heat of her in thanks. 

Waking up sticky and sweaty and smelling of stale sex and old heat. Seeing him passed out beside her pale, with sweat dried on his skin, overheated and sated. 

A look when he’d pried his gummy eyes open and blushed in something akin to self-consciousness now that the hormones were dissipating. 

Scrubbing themselves clean with tough lye soap, averted gazes, fleeting touches— A slow coupling, bodies aching and sore, but the delicious slide of flesh without the urgency of the past four days. How he’d held himself away as his knot swelled, so she wouldn’t feel trapped, touched her reverently, as if she were the center of his world. 

The heat in her face because she knew what it was like to be thought of as something to be owned, but she’d never known what it was like to be someone loved. Not like this.

He left the next day and she went back to her duties as if nothing had happened. 

So it was. 

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


	3. Day 146-503

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0

She didn’t expect him back for her Drop. But he came anyway. Dusty and worn from the road, he appeared thirteen days after the end of their cycles, said very little. 

They existed in a state of limbo. 

No chance she’d said, and he believed her. But the anxiety remained for both of them because… what if?

Joe hadn’t been an alpha. None of the men who’d touched her before had been… Not fertile alphas anyway. The toxicity of the earth made it difficult. So, perhaps maybe there was a chance, and they both knew deep down. 

He slept in her quarters, on a thin pallet on the opposite wall. Propped up on his pack with his arms crossed and his boots at his side, bare feet crossed at the ankles. 

She woke on the sixteenth day with a start and a deep feeling of dread. Thought for a moment that someone stood over her, but by midday the cramping had started and with it a sense of relief. 

And loss. 

Irrational, she knew it. Neither of them wanted a pup. They had only agreed to spend their cycle together because she had proven infertile in the past. 

He would have stayed for all of it—her bleeding and the listless, mournful quality of her scent, but she practically chased him out of her room and he went. Understanding. 

She bled for five days, felt sick and disappointed for two, and shook herself back to normal on the eighth. He was in the garage when she went down. She hadn’t expected him to stay. Really. 

She leaned her hip on the bumper of his car and crossed her flesh arm over her chest, plucked gently at the straps to her prosthetic. She watched him, handed him tools when he called out or them softly. Held a torch for him when he needed it. Pulled a wrench when his flesh hands proved unable to loosen a bolt her metal one had no issue twisting. 

“Max?”

He hummed, listened, but kept his eyes on aligning the new gasket. 

“I’m not…” She worked her tongue around the backs of her teeth; “I’m not regular at all… But—You’re welcome to come back when you go into Rut again… I—“ She felt her cheeks flush. 

The edge of his mouth twitched and below the smears of dirt, and grease she could see his face and ears go pink. 

“—I think we can come to an agreement where our cycles are concerned.” 

He turned and regarded her quietly, hummed and nodded, then turned back to his engine.

The next day she stood in the garden with binoculars and followed the dust trail his car left in the desert until it had settled. 

0-0-0

A healthy Omega wouldn’t have another heat for four months. Furiosa, when she’d been regular as a young woman, had gone six months. His own cycles ran around every one-hundred days, if he had reliable food and clean water. Or so he’d said. He’d gone four-hundred days without a rut once. Of course, he’d barely had enough food and water to keep himself alive. 

Furiosa wondered if he’d Skipped while he’d been in the Blood Shed. Wondered what Stress did to Alphas. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t neutered him. 

The second time he appeared in the dead of night, about a hundred and twelve days after Furiosa’s Drop. He’d had to stay parked down on the valley floor until dawn came and he could be searched. 

And that was an adventure in and of itself. Max smelled heavily of want and ALPHA, and the poor young man who’d been tasked with searching him whined and whimpered and slicked his pants in the time it took him to complete the task and draped himself over the front of the car. His friends had taken him to the wards reverently, in awe. 

Max, however, had sense, even when he was inundated by hormones, seemed more embarrassed by what he’d inadvertently done to the young man and stayed near the edge of the lift, ready to jump if it came to it. He smelled spectacular and in the time it took the lift to ascend Furiosa had gone from dry and unimpressed to practically dripping. She felt both sympathetic for the boy on the lift with Max, and territorial. Snarled quietly as the boy and his friends passed. 

This, in part, was what Furiosa had feared, since she’d been notified of his presence, and the state of him. In the past one hundred days two young men had woken up in states of arousal. A beta, and a long awaited omega. This young man made the second. There were quite a few unpresented or stunted young men in the citadel. Not as many girls, Joe had preferred female ‘breeders’, but having Max here now—especially when the summer weather made the wasteland hotter than normal, and the drugs Joe had put in the water flushed from their systems. That last push was all they needed. The scent of an Alpha in rut—an alpha who was expecting to find succor in the arms and bed of a familiar face especially. 

Max wasn’t just unfettered by the hops he’d eaten before, he’d come here for a reason. He’d come here for Furiosa… 

That did things to a person. Especially a person who was on the cusp of presenting. It could throw them into spontaneous heats, or spontaneous ruts. Furiosa feared that she would have to turn him away or lock him up again. Lock herself up with him… Could an Omega deal with an Alpha’s rut without, themselves, being in heat?

Apparently so. 

It was lighter than before. Gentler in a way. 

He asked to knot her with the pressure of his body only once, and took the shake of her head as law. Held himself away and relished in the rough squeeze of her palm or his own. 

Without the pheromones of Heat to exacerbate the situation, his Rut lasted only about three days and he seemed just as happy to sleep and press his face between her thighs, as he did when she took him inside herself. 

“I grew up believing that Alphas only cared about breeding… Were the stories lies, or are you just something different?” She was rocking gently atop him, pressing her thumb into the tight little nub of his nearest nipple, just to see him squirm up into her touch. 

He said nothing, just pressed two fingers up against her clit and flicked his tongue over his lips. 

The third time he appeared was the same… Almost. On the second day Furiosa’s eagerness changed, her nerves ached. Her body WANTED. 

He stayed a week. Most of which they were together, her body warm and wet and aching in a way that reminded her of heat. 

The fourth time she felt it. Had felt it a week in advance. It was just like she remembered, the insatiable hunger, the want to be TOUCHED. When he appeared they barely made it up to the locking room atop the garage tower before they were tangled together. 

It felt indescribable. Different from their first time, the heat that had occurred then hadn’t felt complete, not like this—This. 

His hands felt too hot and cold and just RIGHT on her hips, on her push. On her face and breasts and back. His thighs felt heavy around her when he changed their positions, guided her into him. No resistance. He was slick, all on his own. 

He pulled gently at her bottom lip with his teeth, moaned deep in his chest as she settled deep. He clung to her, breath shaped like words into the shell of her ear; “’been dreaming about this—“ 

Her hips slapped against his and he worked a hand between them, pushed fingers up into her eager. Stretched as she rocked. “Harder—Harder!” The hand on her back curled, nails digging in. His head pulled forward, brow against her shoulder and he shuddered, burst between them. 

She followed with a hoarse cry felt him spasm around her and his fingers spread wide with in her—

Nothing else mattered. 

Six days. Frenzied. Lips and mouths and his knot stuck in her as they rocked. A look in his eye, helpless and lost and careless all in one moment. Her limbs were restless, wrapped around him as he held deep and came. Shuddering and calling out her name like a prayer. 

Different. 

She touched his face after, when the hormones had died off and they were just lying there smelling of days spent tied. The air hot and full of the warm spice of their combined scents. They’d never be able to wash it out of the pallet, the walls would always hold a trace of it. This space was theirs, they’d claimed it, even if their skins held no marks of formality. 

He tilted his cheek in her palm and touched the creases in her skin with his lips, slept deep and dreamless with his arm heavy over her waist and his sex pressed inelegantly against her stomach and she didn’t think she’d ever experienced anything so confusing and wonderful. 

When he’d cleaned himself and packed his supplies, and the lift had deposited him and his car on the desert floor Furiosa followed, pressed her hand to the scarred back of his neck and her brow to his, lifted her chin to brush their mouths together, the taste of him lingering on her tongue. 

Thirteen days later he returned, like clockwork. She kept him close until she woke up with blood on her thighs, then chased him away. He went without protest. Left his jacket on the back of the chair in her room… When he left again after the bleeding he found her scent coating it, sad and hopeful and warm.

She took the trade rig out the morning he left, kept him as part of the convoy until Gastown where he peeled away from the group and headed off to the west. Always the west. 

She smiled to herself all the rest of the day. 

0-0-0

Fifty-three days later he came back… It was not a celebration.

He smelled—he smelled wrong. Was pale and sweaty and threw up as the lift trembled on its way from the desert floor. Sprawled himself on his face on the platform muttering, “Dizzy… ‘m dizzy,” weakly to Toast who’d dropped to her knees at his side.

Something cold settled in Furiosa’s belly, and she hovered near him, saw the discomfort on his face as he was helped down the corridor to the wards and laid out on a bed, stripped down to thin trousers and mopped with cold water, fed salty broth and bits of mashed potato. 

“It’s the temperature most likely,” Triumph said where she’d bent over him swabbing the creases of his skin with Hel Water. “Summer does it to a person. Especially under all that leather!” She gave his discarded trousers a kick. 

He slept. His scent was still wrong. 

Furiosa began to ache savagely on the second day, an unexpected gush of slick wetting her trousers and she locked herself in her room, rubbed herself out and off against a pillow while she pushed fingers into herself. It couldn’t be true heat. Not really. She’d just come off it not long ago! Her body was just stressed. So used to equating his presence with sex… That had to be it.

Triumph gave her knowing looks when she splashed herself with Hel Water and showed up at the wards to check on Max. 

But Max wasn’t in Rut, couldn’t be. Why had she sprung a partial like this?

It was unsatisfying, infuriating, and didn’t last. By the morning of the second day her body had gone painfully dry and tender as she tried to find relief from an unrelenting arousal.

Max didn’t even go into a partial rut, even when she sat near him wearing a soiled shirt, hoping for some kind of reaction. But it did nothing. In the mornings he was feverish and sick, by evening he was lethargic and wanted to do nothing but sleep. Restless in the afternoons he tossed and turned but had no energy to fight off the wardlings so he stayed in bed. 

Furiosa was angry, inexplicably angry, so she shoved it down. Told herself over and over it was ridiculous! Just because Max was here didn’t mean they had to breed. There was no real reason to be angry with him because he couldn’t help that he was sick. It wasn’t like he’d done it intentionally. 

But he still smelled wrong. And she felt, perhaps, that it was this WRONGNESS that had made her go slick and wanting. Maybe they really were Synced. MATES, like the old stories told. 

She cleaned herself up properly and went to him. Crawled onto the small cot and wrapped her arms around him. Tried not to wrinkle her nose up at the strange bittersweet undertone to his scent. 

Maybe it was infection. A virus like Cheedo had been reading about in the Biology books she’d found amongst Joe’s hoards.

Two days later the arousal came back, low and unsatisfying, she woke to Max’s hardness rubbing at her hip while he pulled her close in his sleep. 

She stole him away to her room and pressed him to the bed, relished in a slow, gentle coupling with his hands reverently petting at her ribs and hips, fingers lifting the small weight of her breasts and brushing his thumbs against her nipples. 

She returned the favor and he flinched violently with a grunt, pulled his arms close to his chest to ward her off. 

“Are you ticklish?” She rocked herself against the growing base of his knot. 

“That hurt!” 

She froze, hand lifted, then lowered to brace against the bed at his ear; “I’m sorry,” She kissed around his throat and chin, guided his hand to her hip and focused on rocking her pelvis, coaxing a knot out of him. 

It took longer than she would have liked, she was already near rage from want. When she woke later, ready to go… he wasn’t. He mumbled a sleepy apology and drifted off again as she was climbing between his legs. 

This time she was angry, growled and rubbed herself against his hip until he’d woken up and pulled her back against his chest and fitted one hand between her legs and the other on her chest, worked his fingers into her and wrapped his scarred palm around her push rubbed until she was shuddering and wet and spent. 

When she woke the want was gone and instead she was aware of a strange warmth in Max’s skin. Not quite a fever, but warmer than normal. She rolled over to look at him and found him deeply asleep. Face puffy and flushed, bare chest rising and falling slowly. 

His nipples were pink and tender looking and she wondered, idly, if they’d chafed under his shirt like hers did sometimes when the outside world mirrored the heat in her core.

She left him to sleep, went down to the main hall for food and brought back a porridge for him. Crinkled her brow in concern when he refused it, face pinched with barely controlled nausea. 

Four days later he was still sick. Worse, if Furiosa had anything to say about it.

She would wake to him choking and sick, hunched over the sand pot in the corner. Or he would be too weak to get out of bed all day. 

He’d barely eaten anything more than soup or salty bread, and he’d become restless at night, tossing and turning and seeking out her scent more than usual. 

And all the while his own scent changed. Sweet where he’d always been spicy. It unnerved her to the point that she caught Triumph in the dining hall one morning and slid into the seat across from her. 

“There’s something wrong with him.” 

“Eh?” Triumph looked up from her food. “Who? Your madman?”

Furiosa breathed deliberately slow. “He smells wrong.” 

“How so?”

“Sweet… He’s never smelled sweet before,” Which she knew was a lie, he’d smelled and tasted very sweet when she’d used her own slick to ease him open. 

“Infection?”

“No… He’s not really fevered anymore. Do—“ She swallowed a lump of fear in her throat; “—Do you think he could have a cancer… inside?”

Triumph considered it, “Would depend… I’d have to examine him… run some tests.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Could be he’s just running dry… Earth’s not what it used to be, folks go dry younger and younger… I went dry before I was your age. It happens.”

“What does that mean?”

“No more ruts, mainly… Get saggy, dry up,” She made a rotating motion with the crook of one finger.  
“Omegas go into Menopause… Alphas dry up.” 

“Would that make his nipples hurt?”

Triumph coughed a little, choked on her food; “What?”

Furiosa hesitated, motioned toward her own chest; “He liked it before… when I—When I touched them… Now they hurt him.” 

She blinked, “Maybe you pinched too hard?”

She shook her head, “I just touched them, like this,” She caught Triumph’s hand in her own and brushed the ball of her thumb over one knobby knuckle. 

Triumph took another bite of her food, brows drawn down thoughtfully, and pushed from her seat. She collected her bowl and nodded toward the door; “That doesn’t sound right, c’mon.” 

Max was still in the bed when Furiosa knocked and pushed open the door. 

He’d rolled himself in the thin blanket and was curled up on himself with his knees drawn toward his chest. He wasn’t asleep, even if he pretended to be. She knew him better than that. He’d been awake since she and Triumph had entered the corridor. 

“Max?”

A grunt.

Of course it was a grunt. She often thought that maybe he was like some of the feral people that could be found occasionally in the mountains. Maybe his voice box wasn’t used to making people sounds… Maybe it had been so long since the engine of his voice had run he needed to clean the rust out of it first.

“Max, Triumph wants to look at your nipples.”

He lifted his head and stared at her, eyes wide for a moment, face pulled into strange angles in his confusion.

Triumph sat her bowl aside and motioned vaguely toward the ceiling. “Midday and you’re still sleeping. Any more vomiting?” She crowded in close to him and he bristled visibly, the little hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, lips rolling back from the sharp points of his teeth. 

Triumph bared hers in return, took half a step back from him; “Stop your posturing… Dried up old alpha like me ain’t no threat.” 

He closed his mouth, seemed a little ashamed, but remained rigid and hunched where he’d leaned up against the wall. He’d hitched the blanket high over the back of his neck and under his chin. 

“She said you hurt when she touched them… That can be a bad sign. ‘specially in alphas. Could be breast cancer, or an infection… Could have worms!”

The edges of Max’s lips pulled down dramatically and he seemed less defensive and more disbelieving when he flicked his eyes toward Furiosa. 

She dropped onto the stool at her work bench and propped her flesh elbow on the work top. 

“Come on,” Triumph was prodding at him through the blanket. Not insistent as she had been when he was so sick before, just annoying him until he complied.

He mumbled something in a strange language—maybe no language at all, just his own frustration and sounds shaped like words—and peeled the blanket down to his waist. 

He was wearing a thin shirt with small sleeves, too loose and fragile to offer anything more than the simplest barrier between his skin and the sheets. Furiosa had found herself admiring the shape of his arms where they were exposed, the difference in the color of his skin, darkened where the sun had touched it, pale where it had not. 

Triumph nudged his arm again and with a roll of his eyes he pulled the shirt off. 

The old woman stilled, hands raised to touch. Leaned in fast and close to his neck and sniffed. 

He curled his head into it in an effort to fend her off, made a grumbling sound in his throat.

Furiosa watched closely, noticed, for the first time really, how pink and perhaps swollen his nipples looked. 

“When did this start?” Triumph pressed her fingers into the flesh of his chest, “’s it hurt here?”

Max’s body said yes, even if the tilt of his eyes into the corner, and the disinterest in his face said no.

“Max,” Furiosa said evenly—reassuringly. 

He sighed, shoulders sagging and tried not to flinch when the old woman’s fingers got close to them; “Sore.”

“Been using your arms a lot?”

“No.”

Triumph sat back and just stared at his chest for a moment, then her eyes slid lower and her brows pulled in curiously, “Last time… when she was in heat— Did you,” She flipped her fingers at his crotch. “Did you use her slick to… to slick yourself up?”

They had… but he’d been particularly wet on his own. Furiosa remembered how excited he’d been about it. First thing, that’s what he’d wanted. Moaned and clutched at her with all his limbs. How different his face looked then, relaxed and open in pleasure, than it did now, pinched as it was in discomfort. 

He pulled the blanket closer, as if wanting to cover himself again. He nodded, focused more on Triumph’s shoulder than her face. 

And Triumph turned to Furiosa; “Are you sure you’re not fertile? Omega slick’s got hormones in it… Works on the womb… makes it easier to catch.”

Furiosa was taken aback, blinked rapidly, “I never caught.”

She turned back to Max; “What about you? Did they test you for fertility when that butcher had you?”

His eyes darkened and he hunched his shoulders.

“It makes sense if you’re sterile or Twisted… But you’re not… I’ve not ever seen a Twisted alpha or sterile one who went into Rut like you do…Your balls are healthy?” When Max only glared at her she turned to Furiosa; “They’re healthy?”

“He’s healthy.”

Triumph’s brow wrinkled, almost angry. “If you WERE twisted I’d just send you to roost with the Bachelors for a week and this’d clear up…”

“What do you think it is?” Furiosa curled her hand into a fist.

“If he was twisted, I’d say the hormones you put in him’ve made his womb enlarge, which would account for the sore nipples, but not the sickness… But the sickness could be unrelated, just a sickness… But he’s not twisted—“ She tapped her chin, “Have you been sensitive in your lack?”

Max’s nose wrinkled; “Lack?”

Triumph made a rolling gesture, “Your vagina.”

He flushed. 

“Let me see.”

And he pulled his legs up to his chest and bared his teeth again.

Furiosa felt a jolt of indignant rage rush through her; “Why do you need to see?”

“Something’s not right… His nipples are engorged and his breasts are sensitive. His womb could be enlarged or cancerous. Alphas don’t just experience this without reason… And this doesn’t look good.”

“How can you tell… if it’s cancerous?” Max said evenly, though the rigidity of his shoulders and the unblinking fear in his eyes belied the calm of his voice.

“I’d have to look inside… If it was cancerous it’d most likely be on the cervix.”

Max’s nose wrinkled; “You mean a pelvic… You—you want to give me a pelvic.”

Furiosa felt a roll of nausea go through her. “You’re not doing that to him.” 

She could remember such things, not just from her own experience with the ‘butcher’ as Triumph called him. 

Max looked at Furiosa evenly, swallowed with a visible amount of difficulty and turned back to the older woman; “If it is?”

Triumph sat up straighter; “Then we could try taking it out… We’d have to take your womb out. Hopefully that would get it all.”

“Maybe—“ Furiosa felt somewhat sick herself; “Maybe his womb’s just enlarged… Maybe—Maybe I’m twisted and I caused it.” 

Triumph shook her head; “If you were it would be less likely that this would have happened…” She tilted her eyes at Max; “Have you been mating with anyone else?”

“No.”

“Then I need to see. If it’s cancer—“

“You’re not hurting him like that!” 

“Furiosa,” He said it low, gentle. Met her eyes when she glared at him with her teeth bared. Was calm when she felt panicked and sick and violated on his behalf. He sighed, shoulders sagging an looked up at Triumph; “Can you tell without that?”

“No… Well, I can tell if you’re womb’s enlarged without that, but only if it’s enlarged quite a bit. Alphas, you see—our wombs are small to begin with, and to be able to feel it through the stomach, it’s a very big enlargement… If it were cancer, it would have to be very aggressive to have gotten big enough to feel externally in the short amount of time you’ve been sick,” She took a breath and let it out. “I can do that first, but then I will have to look. I won’t hurt him, Furiosa. I won’t hurt him.”

Furiosa felt her heart in her throat, eyes locked on Max as he worked himself down in the bed until he was lying flat, practically ignoring her in favor of watching Triumph, holding his trousers hitched low on his hips so the older woman could mash around on his stomach. 

Furiosa could smell the fear in the air growing. It soured Max’s already changed scent and her heart sped up in sympathy. 

And then Triumph spoke; “It’s protruding here, you can feel it—“

When Max lifted his hand she caught it and pressed his fingers beneath her own.

Furiosa wanted to break something.

“Feel it? It shouldn’t do that… It’s up above your pubic bone. That’s not a good sign.” 

Furiosa felt her sinuses burn with the fear growing in Max’s scent; “Can’t you just take it out?”

Triumph sighed and turned to he while Max righted his clothing and climbed unsteadily out of bed. “Despite the fact he’s an alpha, the womb does have a purpose,” She motioned to herself. “There’s a gland in the front of the womb. Vesicles—little tubes and bits of tissue where sperm collects—‘s where slick comes from in omegas… But for alphas, the sperms not all from the testicles or we’d run dry two days into a rut… If I take it out, I take out those vessels. He’d be practically infertile.”

SO? Furiosa screamed in her head. I don’t need him to be fertile—But she froze in the same moment because, no, she didn’t need Max to be fertile… But she and Max weren’t Mates. Max still had a chance of having children with some other omega or beta… Max could leave her and find someone who could give him offspring. Give him pups. 

She felt it like a fist to the throat, all the wind locked itself inside her and she found herself choking.

“I don’t care,” Max said, his voice shook. “I don’t care… Take it out.” 

Furiosa couldn’t breathe.

Triumph blinked at him, tilted her head. “You’ll never have pups.”

He looked at her evenly, trembling slightly with barely controlled emotion.

“It can affect your rut too.”

“I don’t care,” Max flinched where he was assembling his necessities. Boots and shirt, proper trousers. The smell of fear was sour and thick around him, permeating the room. 

Triumph looked at him silently for a moment. “It’ll take a few days to get a place cleaned enough that you won’t die of infection… I’ll need to prepare. Find out exactly where it is and how to approach, what we’re dealing with—“

Max fumbled with his leg brace—dropped it with a clatter—Snarled and kicked it savagely into the far corner, then turned and stood with his back to them, hunched and shivering slightly.

Furiosa shifted forward, as if to embrace him but Triumph caught her arm and pulled her out of the room, shut the door with a metallic scrape. “Give him a moment to process it… Alphas—alphas don’t always perceive touch as comfort in times like this, you know.”

Furiosa did know, felt the same way. But Max was different. He wasn’t like other alphas, and something about his scent called to her, made her feel wrong for being out here and not wrapped around him. Her throat felt swollen; “Is—is he half-life now? Is—If you take it out will be he OK again.”

Triumph sighed and crossed her arms, spoke in a low tone; “I don’t know… If it’s contained only to the womb and cervix I can remove it and he should be fine. His rut would be affected—It’s possible he wouldn’t have them anymore—“

“He’d dry up?”

“Essentially… His hormones would throw themselves through a loop… He could get very sick for a while… Aggressive, withdrawn…” She hesitated, worked her mouth open and closed then forced herself to say it; “He could leave and not come back… You have to accept that. Hormones work with the brain, it could make him paranoid, or hateful… he could completely change.”

“If you get it all, will he be full-life again?”

“But if I can’t—if it’s spread—with as aggressive as it is, he’d have six months—maybe a year. If that.” 

Furiosa wanted to scream, the injustice of it; “Do it… do whatever he asks you to.”

Triumph nodded, met Furiosa’s eyes sympathetically. “You poor creature.”

Furiosa looked at her, brows pulled down in confusion over stinging wet eyes.

Triumph shook her head, smiled softly; “To fall in love, in this world, is a beacon to pain,” She pressed her palm over Furiosa’s heart; “May it find me instead of you.” 

Furiosa nodded, felt a burn in her eyes and all her sinuses, a cool leak down one cheek, she ground her teeth. 

The door opened and Max came out, limping without the brace on his knee. His eyes were red.

Furiosa didn’t touch him. Couldn’t, followed a few paces behind as they made their way down to the garage tower’s medical wards. The Surgery, as Furiosa had come to know it. 

Max was quiet the whole way, hunched and limping with a hand pressed hard into his left thigh. 

She wondered why he hadn’t put his brace on. He could walk short distances without it, but this was pushing his endurance, she could see the crinkles of pain around his eyes. 

Triumph held the door open for them and lead Max back to an alcove in the far wall, cordoned off with a curtain on a long steel rod stretched across it’s mouth. 

Max hesitated, glanced at Furiosa uncertainly without making a sound. His fingers twitched, palm pushing toward the floor. 

She’d seen him make the motion before, while on the Run. It was an uncomfortable gesture, asking her to stay put while he retreated to do whatever business deemed necessary. Furiosa nodded, took up a position beside the door to ward off anyone who could possibly come looking for Triumph.

The older woman went to the sink in the corner and scrubbed her hands and under her nails, dried them carefully on a cloth she took from a neatly folded stack beside the exam alcove. “Get the curtain, then drop your trousers.”

The curtain snapped closed and a light clicked on. 

The room was wide enough, and Triumph quiet enough that Furiosa didn’t hear much of what was said. The scuff and clatter of Max removing his clothes, the metallic groaning of the examination table under his weight. Soft murmurs. A nervous chuckle; “You’ll have to get your tackle out of the way there.”

Max mumbled an apology.

“Breathe out, just a pinch.”

Furiosa dug her nails into the flesh of her thigh.

Max said something, a little louder than before, but it was more a growl than words. 

Triumph appeared around the curtain a moment later and rushed to the sink, scrubbed her hands and turned on Furiosa with an uncertain look on her face. “This butcher… Did he have a belly machine?”

Furiosa faltered, blinked rapidly. Belly machine? She wracked her brain.

“Sonograms? Did he have one? To make pictures of your insides where he couldn’t see?”

Furiosa shook her head. Gas Town had had one, ages ago, but it had been destroyed in the riots after the People Eater’s death, along with most of the Cabinet’s residences. They’d used it on Corpus to repair the damage to his heart.

Triumph peeled another cloth off the stack and dried her hands. Worry and frustration evident on her face.

“How bad is it?” Furiosa scratched her tongue against the roof of her mouth, hoping to cleanse it of the fear in Max’s scent, slowly creeping into every corner of the room.

“I didn’t see anything that looked like cancer… Just mucus—which considering his womb’s enlarged isn’t unusual…” Triumph worked her tongue around the backs of her teeth, eyed Furiosa warily; “When you two… When you were together, during your heat… You—“ She made a gesture to Furiosa’s front. “You bred with him… bred him.”

Furiosa wrinkled her nose.

Triumph leaned her hips against the sink. Max was grumbling as he appeared from around the curtain closing his trousers. He looked particularly disgusted with Triumph and crossed his arms tightly over his chest, limped to Furiosa’s side and seemed to hunch himself up in her shadow. 

When she turned to meet his eyes the edge of his mouth twitched in something like discomfort, as if telling her not to ask what had happened, or if he was OK.

Part of Furiosa wanted to wrap him up and pretend this whole day hadn’t happened. That she hadn’t mentioned his nipples to Triumph or even looked at the woman. It was irrational, she knew. It wouldn’t have changed whether or not Max was sick or dying of cancer, but it would have at least left them all in ignorance of it for a day longer. Maybe they wouldn’t have known and Max would feel better and drive off never to be seen again. 

She would have hated him for it, on some level, but it would have been a superficial hate. The kind of hate she felt for the toxic rain she could see in the mountains occasionally, or the cool breezes that never lingered. 

But they knew now. They knew, and there was a chance to save his life. 

“How bad is it?”

The old woman crossed her arms; “Furiosa… Did they ever examine you?”

She swallowed what felt like a stone in her throat, gave a single curt nod. “What does that have to do—“

“What did they say? Did you have cysts? Or complications?”

“I never caught. I can’t.”

“Did they ever tell you why?”

“I’m infertile.”

Triumph curled some fingers at her; “Come here.”

Furiosa didn’t move. 

“Girl, I’m not going to hurt you… I need to get your scent without his clouding all over you.” 

Max’s head dipped forward threateningly, eyes intent and dark in his flushed face. His teeth made a harsh grinding noise in his mouth. 

But, Furiosa went, tilted her head to the side and let Triumph swipe the sides of her neck with a soapy wet cloth and press her nose to the glandes below her ears. 

“Can I feel your stomach?”

Furiosa’s hackles lifted and from across the room Max made a noise unlike any he’d made before. Deep and inhuman. A call to the wolf in him. For a moment he truly sounded like the feral psychotic the words on his back proclaimed him to be. 

Triumph met his eyes evenly, dipped her shoulders down. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Max meant it. The threat. 

Furiosa’s skin prickled with gooseflesh and her scent rose, sweet, and clear. It brought to mind something crisp and fresh. Soft sprouts of new plants. 

“Just feeling her stomach, that’s all I want to do…”

Furiosa’s head cocked to the side, curious. Watched Max’s face as she moved. As Triumph shoved open the curtain, never let herself get between Max and Furiosa. Kept her hands loose and easy at her sides, shoulders slouched, eyes slightly averted. 

The smell in the room changed. Still a little sour from fear, but overwhelmingly Alpha below the strange sweetness. 

Furiosa laid back on the table, tried to control her own heartbeat. Tried to keep the fear down and out of her scent. Max was running on instinct. He’d been emotionally compromised already, and his eyes were locked on Triumph. Ready—so ready—to jump at her and protect—

Protect what, Furiosa didn’t really know, but it made her insides quiver. 

Triumph spoke slowly, loudly enough for Max to hear. Broadcasted her movements with carefully wide gestures. 

“I’m just going to push on her belly, just like I did yours. That’s all. Her clothes stay on.” 

Max’s nose wrinkled bitterly. 

Triumph’s hands were cold, pressed in just a tad too hard for Furiosa’s liking, but she kept the discomfort off her face. Tried to ignore the twinges of tenderness in the cup of each hip, or that firm pressure low on her abdomen made her push ache and slip outward a little from the pressure. 

“Did that Butcher say anything about your adnexa?”

Furiosa swallowed, “What’s that?”

“Omegas’ve got vessels on top of their wombs… Between the ovaries. They’re part of the fallopian tubes, just as in Alphas they’re part of the seminal vesicles,” She kept pressing, feeling around, with a growing expression of worry on her face. “They connect to your push just like they connect to his.” 

“And?”

Triumph found something tender and prodded at it, pulled back when Furiosa’s belly flinched and Max took half a step toward them from where he was standing by the door. “Sometimes—sometimes during heat, or rut, you’ve got so much fluid going out, that things get washed down the wrong pipes.”

Furiosa sat up carefully, righted her clothing. “What does that mean?”

Triumph’s hands were shaking, eyes no longer on Furiosa’s belly… but Max’s. “It’s supposed to wash the eggs into the uterus, makes it easier for fertilization to occur… But if you’ve got a blockage, or an adhesion or stricture in the tubes… Then the eggs can bypass the womb entirely and wash right out through the push. In the same line—Those vessels connect to the womb and testes in Alphas… Sometimes—because there’s so much of it—sperm gets into the womb,” She twisted her hands together to stop their shaking; “It’s nothing to be concerned with at all, because Alphas don’t have eggs… But if an egg gets in there—coupled with the hormones from an omega’s slick—“

There was that sour stink again—Fear. So much of it. Not just from Max anymore, but coming from all three of them. 

“Furiosa… How often have you used your slick on him? Just the once, or was it more than that.”

He’d been slick… He’d never been able to get slick on his own before—not like that. 

Twice? Three times? Ten? She didn’t know. Every time they’d done it like that she’d not had a second thought about reaching back to gather some of her slick and press it into him. 

“Multiple exposures to that concentration of hormones could cause his womb to enlarge… And if you—If your eggs are viable but bypass your womb—“ Triumph’s hands were still shaking. She pressed them under her arms. Cleared her throat; “I didn’t see any sign of cancer on his cervix… But the OS—the opening—was sealed… I could be wrong, but I think you’re very much fertile, and this is proof of it. His womb’s protruding at just shy of the twelve-week mark… When was your last heat?”

She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do anything but turn and stare at Max.

Max who’d turned a peculiar green color under the fading tan of his skin. He swiped the tip of his tongue over his lips, once—twice—four times, quickly— His head shook. 

Furiosa’s face felt numb. Her limbs like wilted stems. 

Thirteen weeks and five days. 

“Max—“

His eyes were wide, pupils dilated to the point she could see the shine in them. All the color had drained from his face and he looked, if at all possible, more frightened by the prospect of life than by the idea he’d been dying. 

“Son, it’s alright—“ Triump had her hands lifted, was moving forward slowly. “You should sit down and try to breathe. We’ll work it out—“

His hands flexed, opened and closed, open and closed. The scarred, stiff fingers of his left hand shook. 

His scent was thick—sour and dank with growing panic. 

“Max—“ Furiosa shifted to her feet and moved toward him and that’s all it took—

His pupils contracted, flicked leftrightcenter—and he moved—launched himself out the door without a sound—stumbled, went to his knees and scrambled up again. Ran for a dozen or more paces and his bad knee gave out completely, twisted and sent him slamming into the wall and sliding down in a heap in the corner at the end of the hallway. He threw his arms up over his head, and let out a pathetic howling noise. 

Furiosa tried to go to him—felt it heavy in her own gut, but Triumph had hold of her—“No—NO! Don’t get near him—let him alone.”

“He’s hurt—He’s HURT!” Furiosa tried to throw her off, snarled and snapped her sharp teeth, eyes blazing, but Triumph shoved her back into the ward and pinned the door shut with her body. 

“He’s not hurt, he’s scared! And a scared Alpha is more dangerous than an angry Omega, so forgive me my choice of roommates!” 

“I have to go to him—“

“You’ll wait until he’s calmed down!”

“He’ll get someone else up here and hurt them!”

The sounds from the hallway were unbearable. Something in Furiosa’s core HURT along with him. Hurt in a way she hadn’t in a long time. Hurt differently, but the same as realizing the Green Place was no more.

“Furiosa… If you go out there he’ll work himself up even more smelling the fear on you. He’ll hurt someone or himself—“ Triumph breathed in deeply and let it out, the smell of stressed alpha growing thick as she tried to blow it out of her lungs. Bitter and musky. “We all need to calm down.” 

“And letting him go feral in the hallway is a good idea?”

Triumph’s lips rolled back from her teeth but no sound came out—

It was quiet. 

Too quiet. 

She knew. Furiosa didn’t understand how, but she knew even before Triumph lurched to her feet and pulled open the door. She knew and the world spun dizzily in the wake of it. She shoved out of the room and found the corner Max had huddled in empty. Followed his scent straight to the garages and hit the garage floor just as the lift touched down. 

She shouted. Futile, frantic—

But the car was moving—Too fast to be safe this close to the little homes built around the tower’s base. Kicked up rooster tails of dirt and sand. 

“MAX!”

She could follow him. Could send out a salvage party to drag him back… but what would that accomplish? It wasn’t her choice whether he came or went. It wasn’t right to force him to come back, force him to stay… force THIS on him… But she had. 

He’d only agreed to spend their cycles together because she’d promised him she was infertile. 

And she had proven otherwise. She hadn’t caught… No, that perhaps, could have been forgivable. But this? She’d done this to him without his consent. She’d, even unknowingly, turned his body into a vessel for something he’d not wanted. 

A cancer would have been easier to bear, she thought. A cancer would have been kinder, because that could be removed and they could heal from it together. 

But this… She’d done to him exactly what the slavers and Joe and every man before him had tried to do to her, and now she was contemplating chasing him down—gathering every driver she could muster to go after him—

“Lady?” A young man with decorative stripes tanned into his skin crouched near her; “Lady, should we go after him?”

She watched the little dust cloud following his car as it sped straight out into the wastes. West, always west…

“No,” She rubbed her flesh hand over her eyes, drew her knees to her chest and bowed her head against them miserably; “Let him go.” 

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	4. Day 1-64 (Post-Discovery)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Contains brief thoughts and or discussion of suicide, and abortion. Brief scene of attempted rape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg this chapter got out of hand. 27 pages instead of 13. WOW.

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He drove until nightfall. Frantic. Barely breathing. Stopped only because he had to vomit. Stress pouring off of him in waves of bitter sweat. 

No.

No… It couldn’t be true. Couldn’t be. It was impossible. 

He had a gun in his hand before he knew what he was doing. Standing there in the sand under the dark blue light of a crescent moon turning in circles looking for something to shoot. Looking for the source of the voices in his head. 

Some specter, ghost—demon, maybe. 

He had a hand pressed to his stomach. Fingers pushed in hard to feel that rounded LUMP. 

Baby.

BABY.

BAAAAAAAAAAY-BEEEEEEEEEEEEE

A fluttery white form on the nearest ridge with a bulging stomach. Her face was black. Featureless beneath a mop of blonde hair. 

He turned, breath caught in his throat and fired two rounds into the sand where her feet should have been.

Max.

Laughter and screams and the wet rail of breath—

She’s pumping air into her chest cavity.

Lifeless little hands, minatures of his own, pressing out from a woman’s skin, ripping through—coming from beneath his own—Hot burning pressure as they stabbed like knives out through his abdomen and a monstrous slithering THING tore from his body. Left him lying there staring at the black cavern of his insides with guts hanging out into the sand. Burning and sizzling like meat on a fire. 

He dropped to his knees, gagging, braced up on his elbow with one hand around his belly. Sick and sobbing with the thunderous beat of his heart in his ears and a horrible ringing in his head. 

The world grew gray and dark at the edges as he retched and—

\--opened slowly and the world around him was sand and heat and shadows stretched long and black against the desert. 

He was lying in the sand on his face, right arm trapped beneath him, left stretched out at his side and there was a lizard perched on his knuckles. It was a small thing. Had an extra set of shriveled legs tucked up behind its front ones. Its throat bobbed as it sucked in air through its mouth searching for relief from the heat. 

Max didn't move. Breathed slowly. Felt the weight of a presence behind him. The long mouth of a gun hovering at the back of his head. But there was no shadow, no sound of breath or smell of an engine or body odor. No stink of stunted alpha or the salty tang of an unpresented scavenger. 

Just the earthy, dusty, impotent smell of the earth and the sour taste of bile in his dry mouth. 

How long had he been lying there? Had he vomited himself into unconsciousness or passed out from stress?

He ached all over. Felt sore and abused as if he’d been beaten. 

The lizard launched itself free, scurried lightning quick across the sand and disappeared over the crest of the nearest dune. 

Max curled in on himself and took stock of his situation. 

His fuel tank was full, that was a plus. But he had no supplies. No water— And the hard lump of an enlarged womb under his hand. 

Cancer. It had to be cancer. It couldn’t be a baby, and if it was it wouldn’t be there long. He was poison, he’d get sick again—like he’d been before he’d surrounded himself in Furiosa’s scent. He’d get too sick to sustain more than his own life and that would be the end of it. 

Furiosa—

He pushed her out of his mind, drew his knees up as far as they would go, groaned when he realized his brace was still in her room. He’d have to work out a new one. Trade for parts—

Trade what? He had nothing but the damned car and that wasn’t really worth much more than scrap.

Fuel… Fuel, he had enough to make it two—three more days West. Maybe he could get to a settlement, barter labor for food and water. Lie low in case Furiosa came after him… 

He couldn’t think of this right now. Couldn’t deal with it. Just thinking of her made his heart start beating faster and his stomach to roll in fear. 

Baby—BABY—

No. 

No… 

No.

He forced himself up—limped to the car and climbed inside, shivered and started the engine. The compass on the dash was knocked over, it took him a moment to right it. 

West… West for three days, then South for five… Follow the circuit. Wait for backup. Wasn’t that the cycle? Hadn’t that been the agreement once? Too long ago now to remember clearly. 

His hands shook as he searched his pockets, pieced together the tatters of his maps. His vision was blurry. Face wet. 

Breathe. 

Just breathe and drive. Nothing else matters for now. 

They wouldn’t understand. They’d smell something was wrong with him—they’d chase him away. He’d starve to death within two weeks.

He started the car and went forward anyway. Didn’t let himself look back. Didn’t let himself focus on the weight in his abdomen. Or the ache in his chest. 

He didn’t sleep. Not really. The blonde haunted him at night. Stood just at the edges of his vision and watched him from the back hole of her face. 

Sometimes she held the bowl of her stomach protectively, others the front of her dress was black and hollow and blood coursed down her thighs like waterfalls. He would wake from nightmares with a hand on his belly and another over his mouth, holding back screams. 

The first settlement chased him away once they’d got a good smell of him. After the dirt he’d rolled in was washed away by sweat. He’d managed to get enough supplies to last a week… They lasted longer because eating after a certain time in the evening left him vomiting in the mornings. 

The second settlement had been raided recently, they fired two warning shots into the sand in front of him and told him in no uncertain terms to leave them the fuck alone. 

He scratched out their mark on his map and moved on. 

The third village, hidden in the ruins of an old airport was more forgiving. It was populated mostly by betas, and more than half of them were Twisted. They offered him an empty fuselage to sleep in and tough cricket meal biscuits and some of the water from a deep well in the basement of the old building. It tasted slightly brackish, but didn’t give him the shits as he’d feared it would. 

The cricket meal biscuits didn’t taste as good on the way back up. Of course they’d tasted awful to begin with, so it wasn’t much of a comparison to begin with. 

The forth settlement was familiar. He’d stopped a few times before for supplies and fuel. 

His fifth night trading labor, a group of young alphas cornered him in a dead end alleyway between mud huts—He expected a fight, to have to kill them—but they only fought with him until they’d managed to pin him, bruised face first to the wall. Then they’d taken turns pressing close just to scent him. Muttering and shifting uncomfortably that he didn’t smell right. 

“What’s the matter with you?” One of the younger ones said hunched against his back, sniffing long and deep at the place under his ear. Two of the others had his arms pinned and the forth had pulled his head to the side by the hair. 

They were becoming aroused. He could smell it. Peppery and bitter, stunted all of them. Fear bubbled in his stomach. 

He’d heard of it happening, but been lucky enough to have never been forced. Other alphas tended to steer clear of him if at all possible. Max didn’t get involved in other peoples’ business. He didn’t like it. Didn’t want to add their faces to his nightmares. They weren’t his responsibility… 

He fought—struggled, and that only seemed to make the young alpha at his back more aroused. He rubbed the growing length of himself against Max’s backside, more for want of friction in his confusion than any kind of intent—at least so far. But, that could change in an instant and Max knew it. Could feel the tipping of the scales as the others fingers grew tighter on his arms and the back of his neck. The heavy kick of a boot against the inside of his right calf, forcing his legs apart. 

A tongue slid up the side of his neck and he snarled, struggled, tried to headbutt the little bastard— But the others held him still.

A hand slid under his shirt, nails raking over his stomach and down—pushed under the waistband of his pants—

This was it. 

Some kind of cold realization settled over him and he clenched his jaw tight, tried to press his body harder into the wall away from them, tried to find a safe place in his head— Somewhere quiet and empty and AWAY from this. Someplace not here. Not in this body. Not where those hands were groping his stomach and—

“C’mon… This ain’t right—He’s—he’s an alpha.”

“But he smells wrong— He smells like—I don’t know.“

“’s not right. Maybe ‘e’s just sick… Or got worms.”

“He’s right… Piss, he’s sick or something, this in’t right.”

The alpha at his back pressed in for another long deep sniff and snorted, stepped back and rubbed furiously at his nose. 

Max hit the ground hard, bad knee giving out without anyone there to hold him up. He sat there against the wall, tense and ready to spring, head down in a threat, shoulders pulled high. 

Two of them stepped back, wary, shoulders dropping, heads lifting. “C’mon, Piss… Let’s go.”

Piss, what a name. Max growled at him. Not a threat, a promise. 

They left. 

Max sat there for a moment, wiping the blood from his knuckles and under his nose. Still and furious until he realized he was shaking. Shaking so hard he could barely stand, barely limp to his car and get the engine started. 

He drove until the shaking got so bad he couldn’t grip the steering wheel. Until he could see the walls of the next village in the distance and realized he didn’t know where he was exactly. He’d just blindly driven for hours. He climbed out of the car to relieve himself and skirted around the next village, turned out toward the salts in the south-east. Bedded down under a rocky overhang where the shore had been ages ago. Woke sick with a strange dampness between his thighs. 

He dared turning on his lamp and pushed a hand into his trousers, pulled his fingers back wet and dappled with red. 

His heart beat hard. Too fast, breath not coming fast enough. 

Alright then. 

He’d known. Deep down, what a mistake it was. How painful it always was when hope turned sour. 

Why did it have to happen at all, this little spark of life, if it was always going to end up like this? Red and wet and lifeless in the sands. 

What was the point? Why did he let this happen? He should have just stayed away in the first place. If he’d not gone back to the Citadel the first time, this wouldn’t have ever happened. None of this would have happened. He wouldn’t know what Furiosa looked like flushed with want, what she tasted like, what her voice sounded like raised in pleasure. He wouldn’t know the warmth of her embrace or the kindness in her heart. The gentleness in her beneath the layers of hard won might. 

If he’d just stayed away in the first place he wouldn’t be here now, waiting to bleed out what he’d failed to convince himself was a cancer… He wouldn’t be fighting to convince himself that nothing had been there in the first place. He was just sick. SICK. And being away from her scent—her taste and the warmth of her—had given his body enough time and relief to fight it off. 

Just hormones. It was like Triumph had said, a week around other alphas had pushed enough of his natural hormones through his system to purge out the enlargement… This—

He was bleeding… It—it would be over soon.

His hand shook as he wiped it clean on his trousers and forced himself up. His leg hurt—BURNED with every step, like needles or shards of glass. 

His boot was too tight—unnaturally tight. Too tight for as snug as he’d tied the laces. He shined the light down at it, peeled up the fabric of his trousers and found the flesh swollen and stretched smooth and shiny. 

“Fuck.” 

Forget bleeding… This could be bad. This could be fatal. He could have a blood clot, or an infection. He could lose his leg, not just the life—

No. 

No, there wasn’t anything to be done about that. Hadn’t ever been anything he could do, it was just a matter of time. 

The leg though… That he could conceivably do something about.

There weren’t many towns in the wasteland that were civilized enough, and secluded enough to still have Old World technology in working order. There were, however, a rare few who were. 

This one was built inside a ship. Locked forever in sands after the oceans receded. It had been a military ship at one point. Impossibly long with a flat top on which were the remains of an extinct civilization. 

Max had only ventured near once, and he hadn’t stayed long. Didn’t plan on it now. He’d encountered War Boys here before, from Gas Town. Though there were none now. Likely never to be one again. 

They made hallucination drugs the Elite found entertaining, and had a vast supply of old military meals in the ship’s hold. Salvaged from other wrecked ships farther out into the salts. 

He didn’t get out of the car. Kept a shotgun on the pistol wielding gate boy, wedged into a hole in the side of the ship, ready to signal the lowering of the crane lifts. Max could hear them clicking above, ready. 

“You want what?” The boy said.

Max hunched a little lower behind the metal sheeting of his door, “Bandages… Medicine.”

“We ain’t got that!” The kid said. “If you want help you got—“

“The Organic then.” 

“The what?”

Max snarled; “The medic! Get the medic!”

The kid put a bullet through the door sheeting. It lodged went through the seat barely two inches from Max’s left hip. He swore he could feel it burst through the foam half an inch beneath his ass.

“FUCK!”

“Armor piercing rounds… Get out the car and we’ll talk!” The kid said. 

Max sighed and thumped his head against the wire wrapped roll cage inside the car. Heard the clattering of the crane lift as they lowered it on top of the car. Could crush him if he didn’t comply. It was a new trick. One he hadn’t expected. They must have run into some trouble recently to be ready to crush him. “I—I can’t.” 

“Open the door and put out your weapons.” 

He didn’t put out his weapons, but he opened the door, let a man in baggy black shorts and mismatched boots that dropped down in front of him aim a semi-automatic at him. 

Max sighed, lowered his shotgun and had to lift his bad leg out of the car by gripping the fabric of his trousers and moving it. 

“Did he hit you?” The man said.

He shook his head.

“Broken?” 

Another shake. The swelling had worsened as he’d driven. Pressing his fingers into it left little divots shaped like them. Moving it hurt, bending it BURNED. His skin felt stretched and tight and hot, ready to split. 

He didn’t do it consciously. Not by any means, but Max knew when the man noticed he’d put a hand on his stomach. 

“What’s wrong there?” The man motioned, “Your belly OK?”

Max ignored him, left his guns lying in the driver’s seat of the car, kept a small knife hidden in the side of his boot.

The inside of the city ship was cooler than outside. Deliciously so. Twenty minutes in the ‘Infirmary’ and Max was fighting sleep. Feet propped up boots off while a medic wound a bandage around his knee and leg, forcing the fluid out of it. 

The woman smelled like a beta, but Max didn’t like to assume with these people, they had access to old world soaps and tonics that could make you smell like one dynamic when you were a completely different one. She was tall, built delicately with dark skin and black hair. 

“Lynch said you were holding your belly,” She didn’t look up from her bandaging work. “Do you need worm pills?”

Max shook his head, pulled his jacket a little tighter across his stomach and chest. 

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“’s not worms.” 

“Have you been having any abnormal discharge?”

He hesitated, felt his lips quiver. Nodded. 

“Nothing to be ashamed about… Do you have a cycle?”

He swallowed; “I’m bleeding.” 

She looked at him evenly and he could feel the pressure of her proximity. It was difficult to breathe, difficult to think as her hands passed over and around his calf and knee and ankle. Traced his scars with her dark eyes. 

“Drop?”

He shook his head, felt like he may faint and lifted his hands away from his stomach. “It’s—“

She said nothing. Nodded. “I thought you were an alpha, I’m sorry—“

He worked his tongue at the ridges on the roof of his mouth. Tried to chase away the peculiar burn in his sinuses. He said nothing, didn’t contradict her because it would be easier that way. No questions, no prodding fingers. 

“How far along were you?”

He didn’t know… Not really. The days after he’d run from Furiosa and Triumph and the thought of it had blurred together. Thirteen weeks since he and Furiosa had cycled… He’d seen the crescent moon the night he’d fled. And it had come full and waned again. Fifteen? Sixteen weeks? More?

“Sixteen.” 

She nodded, put a hand on his. “How bad are the cramps?”

His brows wrinkled and he shook his head. 

“You don’t hurt?”

He shook again.

Her head tilted to the side, curious. “How much blood is it?”

He hesitated, felt his heart ramping up again, fear turning his scent sour. Glanced away and slowly put a hand in his pants, felt the same kind of humiliation he’d felt with Triumph sticking her fingers and that awful THING up into him to look at his cervix. Pulled his hand free and displayed the little smear of red across his fingers. 

The tension in the woman’s shoulders vanished and she let out a whoosh of breath, her lips pulling up in an attempt to comfort him; “Is this your first?”

No. He nodded, just to make things simpler. 

“You’re spotting, it’s OK. It happens sometimes. A little bit isn’t anything to worry about. Especially if you’ve been very stressed… Have you not felt any movement yet?”

He felt suddenly and terrifically sick. Swallowed a rush of saliva in his mouth and almost gagged. 

The woman gave him a wet cloth to clean his hand and ‘down there’. Took it and peered at the little smear and patted his shoulder. “As long as it doesn’t get any heavier, you should be fine.”

He fled before she could do any kind of exam. Went to the top deck to be let back down to his car, but the sun had gone down and they didn’t move anything after dark. Refused to because there could be potential raiders or wild dogs or snakes or whatever other perils they’d convinced themselves lurked in the dark. 

Max hunched himself up in a corner by the crane lifts and waited for morning. 

The blonde came back when everything was quiet. Just the watchman and his long rifle making a nest beneath the wreck of an old airplane on the deck close by. 

Her face just a black spot, blood on her thighs. He tried not to look at her. Tried not to hear the scream of engines and the sharp peel of her cry as she’d fallen. 

Tried not to focus on the sound of Furiosa’s voice in the back of his mind screaming his name. 

He shuddered. Pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders and rubbed both palms against the jutting bones of his hips. The firm lump under his skin below his navel. He could feel the curve of it now plainly above the hard ridge of his pubic bone. Alien… It seemed bigger in the mornings, before he’d been able to piss. Seemed to strangle all the water from his body it could manage. He was always thirsty, always nauseated and hungry. He ached, and belched and hurt in his guts from gas. His hips hurt, ACHED savagely when he drove. Sharp shooting pains from the small of his back into the globes of his ass and down the backs of his legs. His pubic bone felt sore. His knee and leg hurt almost as bad as his body had after he’d been taken by Joe’s War Boys. When he’d had broken ribs and bruised internal organs. Half delirious for a week as they’d tested and prodded and made sure he’d live before they processed him. 

They’d threatened to neuter him… But they’d wanted him to breed… Or breed some poor omega or beta or another. But he’d been dry—A rare mercy from the wasteland spirits… He’d been there almost three-hundred days in the Blood Shed and hadn’t had a single Rut. 

Hadn’t had one until after the Run, when he’d been sick from blood loss and the wounds in his hand. He’d made it as far as Hold four hard days ride due West of Citadel, wound up laid out on a bench in Granny the Witch’s cave with moldy bread soaked with mother’s milk tied to his hand to draw out the infection. His last two fingers still didn’t work right, were mostly numb. But at least they hadn’t cut them off.

He’d gone into rut lying there. A pathetic excuse for a rut, but a rut none the less. Granny had given him a big jar with the word ‘MAYO’ embossed in the plastic, filled with dried hops. “Eat one or two and it’ll tame it down!”

And it had. 

Until Furiosa had gone In right there in front of him. She’d smelled so sweet… So—so perfect. He’d chewed up a fist full of the little dried buds and nearly killed himself in an effort to ward off his urge to go to her. 

Look where that’d got him… 

Four days and six-hundred klicks or more later Max woke to wet leathers. Thought for sure, that this had to be it. He would turn on his light, and pull a hand from between his legs slick with blood. The ‘spotting’ hadn’t stopped, lessened a bit, but it hadn’t stopped… Maybe it had gotten worse, a big gush of it while he’d been lying there asleep— But before he’d even awoken enough to reach for his light he realized the wet on his legs wasn’t blood.

He lie there silently for a moment, shocked, and popped open the door, climbed out carefully, legs spread apart because the leather was soaked and he didn’t want it to drip into his boots, you really couldn’t ever get the smell of piss out of boots. His trousers however… if he was lucky, he could get the smell out.

“Shit.” 

He stripped them off, tried to wring as much out of his trousers as he could and stood there, naked from the waist down in the growing dawn for a long moment. Swapped the layers of sponge and cloth padding from the metal frame of the front seat with his bedroll. Folded to protect his bare behind and thighs from the mesh. Cursed and muttered to himself bitterly and drove with his elbow propped on the window slit and his head in his hand. 

Pissed himself… He’d not done that before without being too sick, or hurt, or drunk to help himself. The pressure on his bladder returned suddenly. Seemed to just—appear with no warning. There wasn’t much liquid. Just enough to dribble out and make him shake himself to see if he was clogged or something, but there was nothing. Just the pressure. He stood there waiting for more water, but nothing happened, even when he tried to force it. He stood on his good foot for a while, bounced himself up and down a little, reached a hand back to massage his kidneys, but nothing happened.

Eventually the pressure shifted, dissipated, and he scratched confusedly at a twinge of discomfort from the small of his back. 

He was wasting water. Knew he’d have to circle back around to a settlement to barter for some because he was working through it, and his supplies, faster than anticipated. He’d learned to eat around the nausea. Found it was worse if he didn’t nibble some protein mash just moments after he’d woken up in the mornings. It seemed, if he kept a little bit of something in his stomach the likeliness of being sick was lessened. 

But he was running out of protein meal. Down to his last quarter of a brick. There was no excuse, he’d have to loop back.

He growled and argued with the voices echoing in the back of his mind. Of all the apparitions that followed him, he feared the old seed woman the least. She was never appeared in front of him. Never up close and undeniable—unavoidable. She never screamed or accused him of anything or lurked silently at the edges of his vision in the dark. Just hummed and every so often he could make out the shape of her at night, sitting on a rock or on her motor bike chewing on the end of her scarf or cleaning her gun.

She liked to argue with him, not at him. Liked to whistle when he had to piss or squat in the sand. Or as he got tired of driving around half naked and searched through his things for a pair of pants while he tried to bake the smell of piss out of his leathers by stretching them across the roof of the car while he drove. 

Furiosa had given him a pair and he kept them tucked away back here for cold nights, or when his leathers tore. He didn’t think they’d taken them out while he’d been… while he’d been sick. He hoped they hadn’t.

They were brown. Made of some old world fabric with a pull string in the waist to keep them up. She’d given them to him while they’d waited for her drop after their first shared cycle. When he’d been scratching a heat rash on the inner portions of his thighs as it creeped toward his genitals. 

He’d forgotten what it was like to wear pants that BREATHED. He’d felt extremely exposed with his tackle just dangling there behind fabric that could be so easily torn, but oh, it had been luxurious. And the rash had faded in less than two days. 

He found them eventually. Tucked away under the scarf she’d given him before leaving for the salts. Shook the dust and sand from them and muttered as he pulled them on, tied the string in a loose bow beneath the little curve of his stomach. Sat for a while and rewrapped his bad leg, managed to get the bandages spaced enough to have a length to spare. Wrapped his other foot to protect it from rubbing inside his boots. Dug out a divot in the dune, hidden in the shadow of the car, just large enough to lie in while he waited for the engine to cool. Relished in the heat against the sore bones of his lower back. The heat came through these trousers faster than through leather. Slowly burned away the ache in his joints. 

There were clouds today. 

Thin anemic looking things high in the atmosphere. They were moving rather quickly. Fanned out like brush strokes, ripped like the sands. There would be a storm soon. Maybe not today, or tomorrow. But it was growing.

He wondered, absently, how things west of the mountains would be affected. Would they even feel it? Would they see it on the horizon? Would Furiosa look at it and wonder if he was OK? Or would she be angry… 

MAX!

It happened while he was lying there watching the clouds move and rip themselves apart. 

A flutter

He thought for a moment, that it was just gas, but it didn’t release. Remained localized deep in his pelvis. 

He put a hand to it, felt the round, firm protrusion of his womb and everything stilled. 

His heart beat hard and fast and the sensation happened again. Like a painless little muscle spasm. A twitching… 

Movement. 

It didn’t happen again that day. Though he remained focused on the spot. Fearful of it. 

The next morning he woke to it. Almost pissed himself again because the sensation was so foreign, so—ALIEN all the muscles tried to relax to draw back from it.

And again while he was driving, little twitches and flutters. No rhyme or reason to it, but with growing frequency.

There was an encampment about five days travel north east, a tribe that made circuits through the waste. If he wasn’t mistaken, they should be near the mountains this time of the year. There was a scrubby little plant that grew near a miniscule spring high in the rocks these people used to make food or medicine, or some kind of intoxicant. Max wasn’t sure. He didn’t understand their language, and they only tolerated him because he’d traded with them once or twice. Wire and some cricket meal for a few eggs he’d fried on the hood of the Interceptor with his knife to the delight of the tribe’s children. 

Eggs… Fried egg sounded like bliss right about now. 

His stomach roared. 

It took two days travel east to reach the lowest end of the mountains. Another three days skirting north to reach the patch. They weren’t there… But there was sign that they had been recently. Scattered ashes, tire tracks. Chicken droppings that were still a bit sticky when he pressed one beneath his heel, a few feathers caught in the crags of the rocks. 

Max collected the feathers, because everything was valuable and there was no telling what could convince a person to trade with you. 

The tribe’s tracks headed north along the edge of the mountains, but he didn’t want to go north again… not really. The thought of it made his stomach hurt. 

Max could feel it somewhere in his chest, like a compass, pointing him back—To Citadel, to Furiosa… 

It was habit now. Every hundred or so days, when his rut came in… A cycle. 

But there was no rut now. Perhaps an unnamable longing under his skin, but it wasn’t rut. Wasn’t the need to feel her skin, or taste her. It was the want of closeness. Of her scent—not necessarily in heat, or want herself… just the scent of her sweat and calmness. Her closeness. 

The sleepy warmth of her lying in her bed, and he on the pallet in the corner. The comfort of her presence at ease—The sweet spice of her pressed to his chest with her arm around him and her stump shoved up between their chests. The pins and needles of his own arm, numb as it was under her head. 

It hurt… this kind of longing. It wasn’t a biological want. Wasn’t rut or heat, it was something deeper. Something he didn’t think it was possible to have again After. 

But there she was, and there the want of her was… 

And there was that movement in his belly again. An excited trembling.

He was afraid. Afraid of what it would mean if he went back full of life, only for it to wither. Furiosa would mourn for something she didn’t know she could have—Would she blame him? Would he blame himself? 

If he stayed away, when it happened, she wouldn’t know. She would never know, and could live in ignorance believing he and… Believing he was out there somewhere alive and well and… 

It was a gift, staying away. Giving her the ability to believe everything was OK. 

If he went back after, empty. Would she even be able to look at him. Would she think he’d done it on purpose? 

Should he do it on purpose?

It wouldn’t take much… If he followed the tribe’s path until he caught up with them, he was sure they could help. Offer some medicine, or the solid blow of a fist? Maybe a piece of curled wire?

But could he do that? Could he let it happen now that he knew for certain? Now that there was MOVEMENT? Could he reach into himself and pull out that life? 

Could he linger out here, without food and water, with his leg swelling and HURT, and just wait for it to happen?

I don’t know.

I don’t know what to do. 

He hadn’t been good at making choices like this in ages. Choices meant action, action meant caring. And caring was too much of a luxury. 

Caring would get you killed. 

He gaged the clouds growing to the south-east against the length of his thumb. Noticed a brown smudge where land met sky. Waited a few minutes, gnawing on the last of his food, and measured again.

An hour… maybe, but the wind was starting to pick up, so perhaps not even that. He drove for another fifteen minutes, until he found a spire of rock near the base of the mountains. A spindle of stone he might be able to find some kind of shelter in. He wedged the car in as close to the protruding bedrock as he dared and sat to work.

It wasn’t easy. He’d tried to ignore it, but his trousers pulled tight across his stomach every so often in a less than comfortable fashion. Pinched and pulled at the little hairs below his midriff. He’d tried not to notice, to ignore the shape of his stomach as his womb pushed out and forward, working around it when he could. 

He didn’t like this car. It was all sharp angles and cutting edges. He dragged a thick blanket over the car’s engine and tied it down. Made sure as little sand could get into the block as possible. Closed all the window slits and wrapped his scarf around his head and face to block out the grit that would inevitably blow through the cracks. 

Then he settled in to wait.

He heard the cloth over the engine flapping first. Felt the car jostle in the wind… A rumble of thunder, low and echoing against the mountains. 

Everything began to grow dark beyond the mask of his scarf and the light faded from the cracks in the window slits. 

The wind screamed and he could hear the grate of sand grains against the metal, feel the car rocking and shaking as the storm finally blew in. 

Max curled onto his side in the driver’s seat and pressed his hands between his aching knees. Wanted to cover his ears because as it grew the sound of it seemed almost human. 

The echo of voices in the roar of the wind. The thud and crunch of bodies under tires in each clap of thunder. Headlights flashing with each lightning crack. His heart rate began to climb, tension along every nerve. The little hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

He could smell the earth in the air. Grit and silt and red dirt. 

Kept his eyes shut tight and his body tense. Suddenly conscious of the cliff face and rocks around him. 

Could the wind rip them free? Would they fall and crush him to death? Had all of this been leading up to this one moment. Everything aligned perfectly just so he would suffer and wind up in this exact place, in this exact moment, just to be crushed to death?

Should he move the car? Or was that pert of the plan too? He’d move right into the path of the storm, or right into the path of a boulder. 

His heart was racing, and that flutter was back. The MOVEMENT was back. 

He pressed a hand to it, couldn’t feel anything through his skin but the weight and protrusion. It fight perfectly into the cup of his palm now. No longer hidden beneath the thinness of his skin. 

Could you tell? If someone were to see him? Would they be able to tell? Would they know?

Would Furiosa know?

Something struck the side of the car—hard. 

It lurched, rammed hard into the rock and Max wrapped both arms around his stomach, cried out imagining the slow press of weight onto his body. Bones broken, waiting to slowly suffocate. 

What would be worse? Knowing he was about to die, or suffering for hours—

Pumping air into his chest cavity. 

That horrid, wet bubbling—WHEEZING noise. 

Would he live long enough to feel that life in him snuff out?

He thrashed, fought—wedged himself into the back of the car with his dwindling supplies, found things tossed to all corners, and hid himself best he could, arms wrapped protectively around his middle. 

The storm lasted, perhaps, another five minutes. A five-hundred count in Max’s head. 

He remained hidden. Ears strained to pick out any sound. The shift of sand particles. The settling of dirt in the air. 

The sound of his own heartbeat. 

He waited for another five-hundred count of silence before he shifted his head out of hiding—peeled back the scarf and blinked stupidly out at the world.

The inside of the car was dark. A few thin beams of light streaming in through the cracks of window slits, bars of light as the grit that had wafted inside began to settle. He moved cautiously, left leg unstable, knee throbbing. Rolled himself into the front seat again and pulled on the door latch. 

It wouldn’t move. 

He pulled again, slammed his shoulder against it—It wouldn’t open. 

He struggled, yanked down on the slit cover—Sand poured in. 

He whined, scrambled to the other side of the car and pulled open that slit—sand came in, but so did daylight. He tried the door latch… It opened perhaps three, maybe four inches. Barely the length of his hand—and collided with the rock. 

Max snarled, shoved hard against the door, pulled it closed only to bash it open again and again against the rock in growing urgency. 

His heart was beating so fast and hard it hurt, sweat pooling under his clothes. The fluttering in his stomach was rapid, excited—frightened. He pulled open the slit of the front wind screen with a violent snap. Sand poured in. 

Shit.

SHIT.

He scrambled into the back and fought with the latch snarled and slammed his fists against the metal when the hatch wouldn’t open, caught by the weight of the something that had hit him. 

Sand was still coming in through the driver’s window slit, piling up in the seat in a little miniature dune. 

His left leg was screaming, and he searched through his things frantically. Found a hammer and a wrench muttered to himself because his hands were shaking, and wedged himself into the passenger seat, hunched forward to get at the door hinges. 

He could barely breathe, doubled up to reach the bolts. 

If it were any other car. Anything more than a steel box welded onto a chassis Max knew he wouldn’t have been able to get out. He would have been perfectly trapped. But the hinges were merely flanges of metal through which a bolt had been threaded. Simple things, and after a few hits with the hammer they loosened enough that he could get the nuts off and tap the bolt free. 

He was dizzy, half crazed by the heat when the second bolt came free and the door dropped when he shoved on it. Left a gap at the top wide enough that he could crawl through. 

He sat there for a moment, forcing himself to breathe, forcing himself to calm because he was shaking and nauseated and his lungs were cramping. 

He gathered his things and shoved his essentials out the window onto the car’s roof, then carefully stuck his head out to survey his surroundings. 

The sun was still up, burning red and orange on the horizon. There were more clouds now. Bigger ones, heading West over the mountains. 

It was rocks alright. A big one toppled from the little outcropping above him, pinning the back of the car, and more along the driver’s side. Piled high with half of a sand dune. 

He breathed in—out… and stood—gave a startled shout when his left knee popped and pain jagged up into his hip and spine. It didn’t last long but it sucked the strength from him and he hung there, half out of the car for a long while. Until he’d managed to scrape up enough strength to try again. 

Only—

Only he couldn’t. 

He stuck firmly at the waist. 

Ridiculous, he was much wider at the shoulders than he’d ever been at the waist—

“Oh…” He shivered. “Oh—“ He pressed a hand to his stomach and tried to force himself to breathe, tried to drag himself up again—and stuck. His hands shook and he slid carefully back into the car. Sat for a moment thinking and shrugged out of his jacket, pushed that onto the roof and tried again—

Stuck.

He tried again, heaved to push and pull himself out but his stomach was—he was just—

STUCK.

STUCK!

He screamed. Scratched at the roof of the car and kicked at the seat, felt the stone against his back scratching his skin raw, felt the pull and scratch of metal at his stomach and behind. He pressed the heels of his hand to the roof and pushed, tried—pleaded with everything he was to please—PLEASE move, don’t do this!

He wedged his right leg against the rock behind him—PUSHED. But didn’t budge—His stomach pinched painfully and he slid helplessly back inside trembling. Struck at the stone and metal with the hammer until his vision was watery, hands sweaty, and his arms ached too much to lift it again. 

Pushed his head and shoulders out and felt the warped, sharp edge of the metal catch his chest and tear through cloth and skin. Blood poured out, slicked his hands as he fought against the sand and metal trying to get free. He snarled, kicked—FOUGHT but couldn’t—not without pressing too hard on his stomach—not without hurting—

“Stop that bellowing!” The seed woman was at the top of the dune on her bike. “You’ll bring around every raider and jackass within two miles!” She was gripping her gun tightly. 

His voice died in his throat but his struggling intensified. 

Stuck—stuck, I’m STUCK!

“You’re not stuck… Calm down.”

He stood there shivering, bad leg pounding in time with his heart. The world shimmered and the seed woman warped and shifted.

How long had it been since he’d had water? 

“There’s a good lad… Calm down.”

His hands shook as he reached for his pack, found the water and forced down a few mouthfuls. 

Then a few more when those stayed down. 

His head cleared and his arms shook as he strained to lift himself free. Everything hurt. He slid back into the car and eyed the gap, closed his eyes and tried to breathe through the hot, dry air. Oh, but it felt like sleeping too close to a fire! 

He coughed, held his stomach and dragged a blood sticky hand over his face. 

Okay… Okay. 

He turned and put his head and shoulders out again, this time facing backward with his stomach pressed to stone. His leg hurt—too much, barely held his weight. He arched his back as far as he could over the roof, managed to wedge his hip against the rock and swing his bad leg up, knee glancing off the stone and across the wind screen.

Right hip and belly dragging against the sharp plains of the rock he slid out, laid there on his side with his eyes closed panting, half sobbing in relief, relishing in the air on his sweaty skin, both hands across his stomach, feeling little snags in the skin and sticky drops of blood.

“It’s OK… It’s OK… we’re OK.” 

He breathed deep and released it. 

0-0-0

He managed to drag the door out of the hole, took off the shutter on the window slit and used it as a shovel. Sat with his bad leg out and resting while he scooped sand away from the back of the car. 

He got the sand away from the driver’s door and managed to reach his supplies, but couldn’t shift the stone pinning the car in place. Not without help—Not with his body battered, bruised and… and pregnant. 

He built a small fire, big enough to boil water to clean his wounds, muttered to himself as he washed the dried blood from the cut on his chest, bit into the collar of his jacket and put five stitches into it. Unfastened his leathers and sat there in the dim light staring at his stomach. Washed the scrapes and scratches from his panic with shaking hands and shivered with every microscopic twitch from within. 

The blonde was on the crest of the dune, just out of reach of the firelight. The moonlight turned her blue and black and pale silver. She looked at him then turned away and disappeared over the lip of the dune.

He didn’t see her again. 

When the morning came he used the claw of his hammer to peel up some of the metal framing inside the cab of the car, pounded it against a rock until it bent, and fashioned a makeshift crutch to keep his weight off his bad leg. He marked his map where the car was buried, gathered as much of his supplies as he could carry, and struck out into the mountains. 

This far south the Rock Riders wouldn’t be an issue. If he was lucky, he could find a cave or a spring and a place to hunt or gather edibles. Stock up his supplies until he had enough to make it North to the pass. 

Two days in a car, probably more like ten walking in his condition. 

He might be able to barter for passage out as long as they didn’t see the brand on the back of his neck. From what little he’d heard Furiosa talk about, tensions were still high with the Riders. An unstable truce had been met with the Buzzards in exchange for fresh greens and water. But the Riders were… not very forgiving. 

They’d cleared the pass, that he knew, but shot anyone they’d seen come from the direction of the Citadel unless trade was offered. 

If Max showed up on foot… maybe—maybe they’d let him through without killing him. Or, he could try to cross blind territory. Wind up wandering for weeks in the mountains and being taken out by cannibals. 

What would they think? A pregnant alpha. 

It took three days for him to find the spring. A dribble really, from between two rocks. He was half delirious by that point, but he boiled it, simply because he didn’t want to take any chances. The water seemed fine. Slightly sulfurous in taste, but he’d drank worse. 

The lizards, however, were a surprise. 

They came out at night and crept into the little cave with the water, hoards of them. 

Fought and licked at the rocks to hydrate themselves. 

Max watched in fascination the first night, noted, in the beam of his torch, that they seemed unconcerned with his presence. He identified three edible breeds, and one he would eat anyway and hope it didn’t kill him. 

The next day he set a trap. Caught ten. Ate most of them. The next night he caught thirty. Then he shifted away for two nights, set a few traps amid the rocks, and when he woke the next morning, had fifty. 

Gutting and drying lizard meat wasn’t something he usually concerned himself with. Usually, when the need came to hunt them, he was so hungry he just started chewing. But he took the time now, grinned to himself and stuffed the ones he didn’t eat down into the bottom of his bag. 

He didn’t kill the little ones. Or the red bellied ones. Those, he’d heard, were poisonous. But the big ones… 

He licked his lips, and counted. 

If he rationed himself… Ate only enough to keep himself from being sick, set out traps at night—he could conceivably make it.

The tenth day he struck out. Worked his way around the foot of the mountains, down narrow corridors between stones and down paths that showed no sign of human passage in at least a hundred days. There were tough, scrubby little bushes growing in the way with sharp thorns. Their roots wide and shallow. He bypassed those he could, kicked those he could not out of the soil. It kept him out of sign on the open desert floor, so maybe—maybe he could pass by unnoticed. 

The night of the fifteenth day he slipped into the canyon. Made it about a hundred feet before a figure rose out of the darkness at his side and brandished a gun at him. 

He tried to back up, to show that he meant no harm… But the person behind the mask was unsympathetic, grabbed him by the scarf and dragged him to the ground.

They tied him up, put a bag over his head. Took his water, his food, his boots and his soft breathable trousers… Would have taken the very clothes from his body but one of them—a beta from the smell of her—had found his stomach. Tried as he had to hide it beneath layers, she discovered it. Pulled his head to the side and bent over him sniffing loudly. Paused, and turned her helmeted head toward him in keen interest. 

Max felt his hackles rising. Wished they’d just leave him alone, and go to sleep so he could make an escape. But these people were no desert raiders. They weren’t self-assured. Weren’t overly ambitious. Wouldn’t make stupid mistakes. They were cautious, intelligent—and had outlasted more attacks than Max had the ability to comprehend. 

The beta tilted her head up and stared at him. “How long?”

Max sealed his lips, refused to speak. 

The woman stepped closer, kicked him hard in his bad knee; “You’ll talk or we’ll cut it out and see for ourselves.” 

He swallowed, “’hundred-forty days… give or take.” 

The woman stood there silently. “Your mate?”

Max met the reflection of himself in her visor evenly, then away, swallowed a growing tightness in his throat. He gave his head a little shake. 

It wasn’t a lie. Not by any means. 

“You’re traveling where?”

“Does it matter?”

“We don’t hurt children,” She said. “We’ve lost too many of our own.”

“But you’ll cut it out of me to find out if it’s real?”

“No… But the threat of it got you to talk.” 

He scowled, mostly to himself than anything. 

“Funny thing… a pregnant alpha. Very rare… Very dangerous.”

Max refused to look at her, even if his heart beat hard when she spoke. 

“In the morning you can go… You come back after it’s born, we’ll kill you. No hesitation.”

They gave back his boots, and trousers, and half of his food. Kept the crutch he’d made for himself, and all the little traps he’d put together from scrap to capture lizards and small game. Put a bag on his head and tied him backward on the back of a motor bike. Drove too fast, with too many turns and sharp declines to be anything but a diversion. Stood there laughing while he emptied his stomach when it was over and left him to walk. 

He made it five kilometers before his leg gave out. Swollen and throbbing. He buried it in the sand hoping for some kind of relief and tried to hold back the moisture dripping down his face. 

He still had another ten kilometers to go before he would be in range of the Citadel’s patrols. Unless he was lucky enough to be spotted by one of the long patrols—which was unlikely. They tended to skirt the two weeks around the mountains instead of dealing with the rock riders. 

Ten kilometers may as well have been a million. His leg wouldn’t budge. Hurt and BURNED from the fluid caught under his skin. It had reached the point the other foot was starting to swell too.

Dangerous, the beta had said. 

If he didn’t get some kind of help he could lose his leg. Little red starbursts of broken capillaries were already forming on the sides and top of his foot, pockmarking his ankle.

He rummaged through his things, found two straight thirty count clips empty of bullets—of course—and bound one on each side of his knee as some kind of support. Cursed at himself aloud for suffering the pain and not going back to Furiosa’s room for it. 

Would she have understood? If she’d cornered him in that condition? Would she have let him go if she’d known how afraid he’d been… How close he’d come to scratching the veins from his arms. 

It seemed so long ago, such a silly thing. 

He’d feared the idea of it. Of a— of being pregnant. Pregnancy in general. Because pregnancy meant life, meant a pup—BABY— A little person with a nose shaped like his mother’s and Max’s sly grin—that grin he hadn’t felt in lifetimes, or so it felt. 

It meant loss, and fear, and small lifeless limbs covered in blood. Bones broken before they’d even had a chance to grow.

He couldn’t go through that again. He couldn’t. 

But that didn’t stop it from happening anyway, right under his shirt. 

He touched it, compulsively. Fussed with the closures of his trousers, sunk low against the growing bulge of his stomach. They’d fit higher barely a week ago… Would soon slide off completely if he didn’t find a way to hitch them upward a little. 

When did this happen? When did it become more than just the subtle curve of his womb pushing up above his pelvic bone? When had it become a BELLY instead of something he had to search for with the pressure of his fingers. 

Shit.

He hiked his shirt up and stared at it. Impossible. 

It was as if, overnight, it had happened. 

“Shit.”

He worked his tongue at the backs of his teeth nervously, tugged some of the thick, repair twine from a tear in the leg of his trousers, wound it through the button loops and pulled his trousers up a little. Was almost horrified by the gap. Tugged his shirt over it, and his jacket, arranged his scarf so it hung farther down his chest and obscured it a little. Practiced hunching his shoulders forward so his sore chest and belly seemed to blend in. 

The makeshift brace on his knee helped a little. He made it three kilometers before the pain was too great to stand and the clips started bruising. 

He tried moving again after a long rest, barely made it out of sight of the place he’d fallen before and couldn’t move another inch. Sat and batted at the wetness on his cheeks, gripped his leg as if he wished to remove it, like a flat tire, and replace it. 

There wasn’t much he could do but rest. Hope the swelling went down and the pain abated. But he only had, if he was lucky, six days of food left, and ten days of walking at this pace, before he even had a chance of being spotted by a patrol… Unless.

Unless he made himself visible.  
The dunes were too high to be seen over, too many rocky islands amid the sand between himself and citadel to make any kind of line of sight possible with the polished metal mirror he had hidden in his pockets. 

And he didn’t have a flare. 

The bullet farm was closer… He might find some kind of help there—or they might find him a novelty and decide to hide him—keep him for themselves. 

The Bullet Farm was always a tossup. They had water, grew some of their own food if you could stomach that algae. They could outlast Gas Town, and out shoot the Citadel. But couldn’t produce bullets without fuel. Which they wouldn’t get unless they honored the deal… or banded together with Gas Town to overthrow Citadel.

Which could be disastrous. But, just from what he’d overheard, Max was sure the new leaders of Gastown, and the Bullet Farmers weren’t as likely to waste lives when sending a ‘diplomat’ to Citadel to talk with the Brothers and Sisters, could be more effective. 

They’d wised up, or so the continued peace said. 

Max didn’t trust easily, especially after he’d traded for that algae. Rotten stuff. There seemed to be more of it every time he’d looked at the bottle than there had been when he’d been tricked into trading for it. 

Tastes like sprouts… right. Tastes like SHIT!

He spat, just from the phantom taste still lingering around the roots of his teeth. Nearly gagged when the act of spitting ramped up into a wave of nausea that he almost couldn’t quell. 

Shit.

He couldn’t build a signal fire. He didn’t have anything to burn. They’d taken the twigs and sticks he’d collected and tied to his crutch to build fires with. Left him barely enough supplies to make it to Buzzard Territory, forget about all the way to Citadel. 

Next time the Riders decided to send someone to negotiate Max wanted to ask if he could come, just to be spiteful… But that would mean staying… that would mean staying for more than a few days and—

Why was he going back at all? It wasn’t just the knee brace. He—he could survive without it until he managed to find another, or make another. But with… other things. With his stomach growing and his legs swelling. 

He needed help. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he shouldn’t have left. He was just—just so scared. Was scared now that he’d die out here and Furiosa might find his body some day, withered and dry with a tiny body rattling around his mummified insides like seeds in a dried pod. 

He knew just what it would look like. What that tiny body knocking around inside his dried corpse would sound like. He gagged again, pressed his tongue hard into the roof of his mouth and laid back struggling to breathe.

Please. Please, don’t vomit. Please. Not again. Please!

His stomach finally settled and he laid there like a dead thing for a while in the heat of the sand and sun, felt the decision like an added ten pounds to his gut, and rolled to his feet. Gripped his thigh and pushed on, headed south toward the Bullet Farm. 

As soon as he could see it he stopped. Sat heavily in the sand and flashed ‘S.O.S’ at the watch towers. Kept his body hunched and tried to calm the frantic beating of his heart. 

When nothing had changed at the Bullet Farm an hour after his signal, he did it again, five minutes later again. And again. 

The sun was starting to sink and Max felt a thrill of dread rip through him. He flashed the mirror rapidly, no sense to it, just frantic flipping.

Did they see? Were they ignoring him? What—

And he noticed three specks moving on the horizon. Not from the bullet farm, but from Citadel. He blinked rapidly. Startled. Lifted a shaking hand and measured the distance against the length of his thumb. 

It wouldn’t be long… Ten, fifteen minutes. The cars disappeared for a bit, reappeared over a rise, much closer. 

His heart beat hard. 

He could still hide. 

No… No. He’d wanted this—He… he needed it.

Max didn’t recognize any of the young men in the cars, and he wasn’t about to tell them who he was. They gave him a wide berth. Splinted his leg with strips of flattened plastic. He kept his scarf bunched at the back of his neck. Spoke as they searched his pack. Said that he’d heard there was a medic at Citadel, and he’d trade labor for her care.

The boys took his knife and eyed him suspiciously. Two seemed particularly interested in his scent, but Max snarled at them and they backed off, curious but wise enough to know an Alpha when they smelled one… Even if he smelled weird. 

One of the boys signaled Bullet Farm again. Rapid flicks of a light and mirror. Got a return signal and then the cars started moving. 

It was tense, to say the least. Bouncing along with his leg stretched out, aching savagely in his hips and back. Trying to hide the jut of his stomach with the hunch of his shoulders. Trying to keep these strange boys with green handprints on their chests far enough away that they didn’t catch the sweet smell of LIFE on him. 

Had he done the right thing? Or had he just been picked up by raiders disguised as Sentinels. His heart started beating faster, harder. Irrational fear—rational fear. 

He had no weapons. Nothing but his fists and anything he could lunge for. And eight trained fighters. 

He couldn’t breathe. Tried to choke it down. Tried to hold it back. But his throat was closing. Everything was closing in—He could smell the sour stink of fear even on himself. Could see the worry and confusion on the boys’ faces. 

Could smell fuel and grease and stunted alpha on some of them. 

One swung himself into the back with Max, dark brows pulled down over dark eyes. He had a wedge of brown hair on his head and a decorative lines tanned into his skin. Bands around each arm underlain with scars of skulls and wrenches and engine parts. 

“Put your head between your knees… Porker—he’s my mate—he gets breathin’ attacks too. I don’t have none of his paste though, so try to breathe ‘til we get back.”

Max bowed his head as close to his knees as he could, wrapped his arms around the back of his neck self-consciously. It was too crowded. Too MUCH. 

Another boy swung into the back, offered his canteen. Let Max take slow drinks. 

Max wanted to fling himself from the moving car. Both of the boys crowded so close smelled of stunted alpha and he could remember the pawing slimy feeling of hands on him the last time other alphas had gotten too close, too interested in his scent. 

His chest hurt. A harsh STING with every beat. His vision clouded at the edges. 

“Easy now—“

“Get him out—Gears, mate—he’s stinkin’ up the whole car!”

“I’m tryin’!”

There was a repetitive clanking noise from above. Someone was singing in a low, gravely voice made brittle with age. 

“Doo-wah-ditty-ditty-dum-diddy-doo! She looks good—“

“LOOKS FINE!”

“Looks good, she looks fine! And I nearly lost my mind—“

Max lashed out, half blind, half feral—snarling and scratching and snapping his teeth. 

Someone screamed. 

The singing stopped.

Thudding footsteps. 

Hands on him. Wrapped around his chest—pinching the ache still lingering in his nipples—‘

He bit. 

Caught flesh between his teeth and BIT. Sharp, alpha teeth tearing into soft skin through cloth.

A voice in his ear—a gasp.

And everything exploded. 

Sweet. Perfect… the bite of a metal palm against his back. 

His eyes opened at the same moment his jaws sprang apart. He could taste blood. HER blood. 

She dropped him. Flesh hand slapping up over the blossom of blood on her shoulder, eyes wide and shocked. 

Max landed hard, scurried and practically hid himself behind the wheel of the car. A hot tail pipe burning into the exposed skin of his waist as he tried to back himself under the car in search of shelter. 

Furiosa was staring at him in shock. More surprise than pain, with her mouth dropped open. 

Triumph was above and behind her on the ledge, gave a leap and launched herself down onto the platform. Went first to Furiosa to check the would, then the concern on her face melted and her shoulders lifted. 

Alphas smelled potent, even after drying up… But Triumph glared, puffed herself up defensively and took two steps toward Max, heels jarring the whole platform with each step. 

Max put a hand up, the other curled around his belly protectively, Furiosa’s blood still on his lips and teeth. 

You left! YOU LEFT US! 

You left us to DIE!

He choked, all the water he’d swallowed spilling out. 

“MAX!”

And the world fell away. 

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	5. Day 65

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max and Furiosa discuss the implications of what they've done. Discussion of abortion and other options.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Talk of Abortion in this chapter. You're warned. 
> 
> Very short chapter before things start moving along.

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“I need to see him.”

“Well, he’s in no condition to see you… Dehydrated… He needs to rest. It’s dangerous.” 

“I have to see him.” 

Max blinked his eyes open slowly. 

“He fought you—nearly took a chunk out of you—“

“He was scared.”

“He bit you in fear—his mate!”

“We’re not mates!”

It was quiet. Max’s heart started beating faster as he took in the room. 

It was Their room. Still faintly held the smell of them. There was a needle in his right elbow, that arm tied down to a board to keep it straight. There was a little blood leaking out around it, staining the cloth binding it down, another bottle of fluids hanging above his head on an old coat rack with a skull on top. 

He felt strange. Loose. Had they given him something? Some drug?

Everything ached. 

“Furiosa, he could be dangerous—“

He didn’t feel dangerous. He gingerly touched his stomach, found it firm and poking out as it had been for days now.

“I need to see him.” 

Triumph sighed—he could smell her—hateful old dried up thing. His heart beat hard again and he had to force himself to calm. She hated him. He could feel it—she hated him and she wanted him to go away—

The locks on the door clattered and light spilled in. 

Max tried to pretend he was asleep, but Furiosa—She could tell. He knew she could, so he just focused elsewhere. Pulled his aching legs toward his chest and rubbed his cheek against the pillow. 

Furiosa pushed the door almost closed. Let light come in, breaking up the black and silver shadows around the room. The lamps outside the door fluttered. 

She paused by the foot of the bed and regarded him silently. 

Max could smell antiseptic on her. The faint tang of blood, not just from where he’d bitten her. She’d just come off a Drop… She’d endured a heat without him.

His sinuses prickled. 

“Max?”

He flinched, couldn’t stop it from happening. Wanted to dig his nails into his arms because he’d FLINCHED. 

Her voice sounded clogged, wet; “Max, look at me.” 

He tried—oh, how he tried—but the guilt bubbled up like bile and his vision blurred. Went watery and leaked down his cheeks. 

She didn’t ask why he’d left, even though he expected her to. Even though he felt he owed her some kind of explanation. He didn’t have the words though, and maybe she knew that. Maybe she understood. 

“Are you OK?”

He snuffed wetly, nodded, choked and bit back a sob. 

She hated him. He knew it—he’d hate him too in her situation. Running off and hiding for so long. Oh, she must hate him so much!

“Amita rebound your leg… She—“ She cleared her throat; “She says you should stay off of it… That your limb nodes… or—something like that—that they’re damaged where you were hurt before and that’s why it was so swollen… Max, please say something.” 

His lips parted, words balanced on the tip of his tongue, but nothing came out. He choked again, tried to stay silent, but couldn’t pull in breath fast enough.

He could smell her distress. Bitter and sad and fearful, and the next moment she was lowering herself to the pallet beside him, petting her hand over his face and hair. Brushing away the wetness on his cheeks and lashes with the pads of her fingers. 

He tried to turn away, but found himself drawn in, the sour haze of his fear in the air slowly dissipating until he lie there spent and breathing through wet, clogged nostrils and blinking sore, gummy eyes while she just petted his head and face. 

It was quiet for a long time. So long he wasn’t sure he remembered the sound of her voice. 

“Are you OK?”

He snuffed, gave a fraction of a nod. 

She fussed with the hair at the back of his head for a moment. Let out a breath of relief. “Want me to get that thing out of your arm?”

He nodded again. Squeezed his eyes shut as she untied the splint and slipped the needle free. Held pressure with her flesh fingers while he levered himself up to sit on the pallet, rubbing tiredly at the stuffed swollen feeling of his head. 

“Better?”

A nod. 

She released his arm and sat back on her heels in front of him, eyes shining in the diffused light. She chewed her lips nervously and it was as if she could feel the beat of his heart. 

“Max?”

He looked up at her with a sigh.

Her breath shook as she inhaled, eyes steady on his. “Can—May I see it?”

He drew his chin down, fearful. Felt his muscles go tense and protective but—His chest ached and he swallowed with some difficulty. He’d not showed anybody. Not willingly. But he—he wanted to. He wanted her to see what they’d done. As frightening and impossible as it seemed. 

She didn’t look down at first, not until his hands twitched, motioning to it in invitation as his back straightened. 

There wasn’t much to look at, Maybe a hint of something under the bulk of his shirt—But then his hands moved again, caught the tattered fabric and drew it up. 

He’d never been ‘thin’. Not in the way some of the boys were, and some of the scavengers she saw coming in to trade in the market were. He was built broad, wide with big hands and thick, tough bones. Even when he was malnourished he seemed larger than other alphas and males in general. She’d seen him before, though. During their shared cycles. And he’d not had an ounce of fat to spare on him. All lean, starved muscle. Under-toned because survival sometimes meant a day, or two-or five without food and the body had to get it somewhere. His belly, however flat, and however sharp his hipbones had looked before, was no longer shaped as she remembered. 

If she hadn’t known, hadn’t been able to smell that strange sweetness of fertility on him she would have guessed he was so malnourished his body had begun to swell as it digested itself. A perfect dome between his hips. 

She’d seen omegas and a few betas in such a condition. Seen Wives whose bellies grew like ripening fruit and she’d always felt somehow sad for them. Seeing Max like this—part of her wanted to feel sad—a response learned more than genuine remorse, because she remembered this happening. Remembered the look of bliss on his face as he’d asked her for it—How he’d moaned and clung to her in desperation. The taste of him. 

“I’m sorry…” She felt her lip quiver, a sting in her sinuses. “I—“

But he wasn’t looking at her, had cupped one of his big scarred hands to the lower curve of his stomach, the other holding his shirt out of the way; “It’s moving.” 

The words died in Furiosa’s throat, her eyes widened, met his when he tilted them up cautiously. 

She shivered. 

He looked down again, head tilting a little while his brows drew together; “If it—it doesn’t stick…” He swallowed. His mouth opened and closed and he snuffed again, dragged the fist he’d been holding his shirt with under his nose. “I did’t think it would stay… But it is and… And it’s moving, so—so that mean’s it’s alive.”

“It’s moving?”

He nodded.

“R-right now?”

Another nod. 

It struck her then that this terrible thing she’d done to Max was alive. Wasn’t a thing to be done at all. She felt dizzy with it. There was a little person growing inside him, and she’d had part in putting it there. It was as much a part of her as it was a part of Max. 

She remembered, that at the green place, babies weren’t considered property. They were raised by the community, nursed by their mothers. Bearing a child was a choice, not a duty. Not a purpose. She’d been too young to truly understand at the time, but a mother was more than the person who bore you. They were a teacher, a friend. A confidant. She recalled her own mothers reverently, both the one who’d birthed her and the one who helped make her who she is. 

Mothers here… Mothers she’d encountered since she’d been stolen, were very different. Sad, wounded things, treated more like vessels than people. Even now, most—if not all—of the pregnant people here were so because of a sense of duty. Because it was their ‘responsibility’ to provide Citadel with more bodies. More workers. More breeders and Sentinels. 

Is that what Max was thinking? If it was, she didn’t want him to keep it. She didn’t want to be responsible for that. She’d done terrible things to stay alive, but that was over now. She was free—was rebuilding the world with the help of the sisters and brothers and mothers. It would take time and hard work, she knew. Changing the city’s mentality concerning pups and babies would not be accomplished quickly—but she did not want to turn Max into a thing. Not in her name, not in anybody else’s name. 

She remembered Cunning’s excitement, three-hundred days or more ago, when her pup had started moving. How everyone who’d passed had wound up with a hand in the beta’s possession, pressed tight to the proud mound of her stomach. The firm squirming pressure of life under her skin. She’d been the first ‘breeder’ Furiosa had seen to want to have a child from more than a sense of duty. 

Furiosa hadn’t dared to ask to feel it. Could vaguely remember, as a child, one of the mothers allowing a small hand to follow the movement of a foot, or elbow under a flowing blue blouse. At one time she’d craved it herself. What it would feel like to build a life within her. But as she’d grown—that hope had become sick dread. A fear and torture. And a blessing to be separate from. Now, faced with the prospect that she’d done that to someone else—to MAX of all people—left her feeling slightly nauseated. Pregnancy had come to mean force and ownership to her, even as she tried to convince others differently. She was afraid of what she’d done—afraid Max would resent her for it—or think she’d demand obedience, or ownership of him and the—their child. 

She didn’t remember how not to do those things. How to be a parent instead of a possessor. 

“Do you want it?” The words came unbidden from her. Insides turned cold in a desire to remain separate from it. Separate from all the fear and sadness and hope because it could destroy her if she let it in.

He didn’t answer. Just stared at his stomach with his face pulled into something like a scowl. 

“If—“ She swallowed a burning sensation in her throat; “—If you don’t want it… I—Triumph or Amita can make a tonic—or a tea or something… It—It’ll make—“

His shoulders tensed; “’could have poisoned myself with hops again… Enough of them to—“ He cleared his throat, “—wouldn’t kill me.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugged, scratched dumbly at the little line of dark hair disappearing beneath the gapped opening of his trousers. 

“Do you want this?”

“Might not happen… might end on its own.”

“You might have a baby though… is that—is that something you’re OK with?”

No. Not really… Not—not really? He didn’t know, said nothing but pursed his lips. 

Furiosa’s heart was beating fast, so loud she feared it could be heard outside her chest. “Max.”

“I don’t know i-if I can do this.”

She nodded, forced herself to breathe slowly; “I can get the herbs—“

“No… I’m—I’m not doing that. I won’t,” He couldn’t look at her, “If—if it’d been before—“

“Before it moved?”

He shook his head; “I can’t kill it… If it goes on its own, that’s fine… but I can’t kill it.” 

“What if it doesn’t? What if you—what if it’s born?”

His mouth opened and closed. 

“It would be yours.”

His head tilted down, fingers twitching; “And yours.” 

It scared her. “I’m not a mother… I—I’d hurt it.”

He looked at her evenly; “Could you do it?”

“Kill it?”

“If you… if this had happened to you.”

Her jaw clenched.

He motioned to her middle; “Could you?”

She looked at him with her jaw clenched. “Yes.” 

He seemed to go perfectly still.

“But I don’t know if I would…” She sighed shifted to sit a little closer, her arms crossed over her knees, metal fingers clicking as she twitched them toward his stomach; “I can’t make this choice for you… But if—if you want it, or don’t… or just want to wait and see what happens, I’ll follow your lead.” 

He rubbed his nose again, “I—“He chewed his tongue a little; “I need to think.” 

She nodded, swallowed her uncertainty and rested her hand on his against the sheet.

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	6. Day; 66-67

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains more talk and thoughts of abortion/miscarriage.

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Day 66-67

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He didn’t leave the room. Furiosa didn’t know if she was welcome, as he’d turned his body away from her and was lying on his right side with his shoulders hunched and his arms around his belly. Did he want to be alone? Did he want her to stay?

SHE wanted to curl herself against his back and breathe in his scent. Sweetened as it was, it was somehow still HIM. Still MAX and she wanted to coat herself in it. From head to toe, inside and out.

She felt weirdly damp between her thighs but not enough to necessitate crawling all over him like she wanted to.

It was something else.

So, instead of staying to find out what it was, she climbed to her feet and dusted herself off. Left the room and prowled around the kitchens. Tried to hide herself in corners and act unassuming, but the kitchen staff was by no means stupid. They could see and smell her. Laughed like they would at a pup trying to creep in and steal away with a bun or an uncooked potato.

Capable was there, working her shift, coarse flower sprinkled across her face and arms. She was kneading flatbreads with two other women at a low table by the ovens. Sweat beaded on her brow and in the creases of her skin, filled the room with the sugary presence of her.

She lifted her head when Furiosa approached, smiled; “He’s awake?”

Furiosa nodded.

“Can I see him?”

A few other eyes lifted, curious. Furiosa shook her head; “He needs to be alone.”

“Is he still feral?” Capable’s eyes lit on the bandage on Furiosa’s shoulder.

“He’s not feral, he was afraid… It—it wasn’t his fault.”

“But, biting his mate like that—“ One of the young men in the kitchen mumbled, dusting his hands on his trousers as he peered into the ovens to check the state of the bread. “In open air! Where anyone can see?”

“I’m not his mate.”

“Might as well be!” Said an old woman with faded tattoos of wings and flowers across her bent, withered back, “That’s near to a claiming mark as you can get now-a-days,” She wagged a finger at Furiosa.

She put a hand to it, cold dread sliding down her spine; “It’s not. He was scared,” She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders; “He needs food. He’s too small…” She stalked away, went to the far end of the kitchen where the finished bread was being wrapped in strips of cloth.

They were sturdy round loaves kind of curled up at the edges during the baking process. Flaky crusts and soft innards turned into edible bowls.

She lined the bowl with large leaves of lettuce and spinach, then let Capable drop a scoop of thick stew, beans, and small chunks of salty meat with large chunks of potato and carrot. They’d put maize in it this time, and seasoned with garlic and herbs she couldn’t name. Topped with a slice of tomato. It smelled heavenly.

“Here,” Capable said turning, plucked up an apple and tucked it into the metal palm of Furiosa’s hand; “Give that to him.”

“That’s yours,” Furiosa tried to hand it back.

Capable pressed on the steel fingers, keeping them closed. “I want him to have it.”

Furiosa looked at her evenly, tried to will the girl to take it back, but Capable was stubborn. Had grown a streak wider than the wastes. Once she’d set her mind to something you couldn’t change it. She was immovable as the very stone walls around them.

She wondered, for a split second, if Capable knew. If word had spread, somehow, that Max was pregnant. Nobody knew but herself, Triumph, and Max… She hadn’t told a soul, and she knew Triumph hadn’t. It was unlikely that Capable knew, but still she wondered. What if?

What would they think if they knew she’d put a pup into the belly of an Alpha? What would they do?

Should she tell them? Tell someone?

Furiosa breathed deeply, nodded and took the apple with her.

Triumph was sitting outside the door to their—Max’s room when Furiosa arrived. Had a chair leaned back on its warped rear feet and was repairing a bit of rope she had looped over her arm. Braiding the frayed ends together snugly.

“Has he come out?” Furiosa stopped in front of the door and stared at it.

“Nope.”

“Has he made any kind of noise?”

“Nope,” Triumph didn’t look up from her braiding.

“Did you go in and pester him?”

A snort; “Nope.”

Furiosa tucked the apple into the bend of her flesh arm and rapped against the door. “Max? I—I’m coming in,” She waited a four count, and pulled the door open.

He’d dragged the pallet to the far wall, bent and warped it into a sort of chair and was sitting there staring at the window blankly, running the tip of his middle finger around and around little dimple at his waist through the fabric of his shirt.

He looked strangely pensive and lost in thought. Lids heavy, eyes focused on something inward, and so—so sad.

Furiosa stood there for a long moment, breathing and just looking at him, staring at the protrusion of his stomach, how it pushed out the fabric of his shirt—how his trousers rode low beneath it.

It was so strange, so WEIRD. But so familiar. It wasn’t big enough that the fact of his condition was undeniable. He still had that to his advantage. He was underfed and broad enough naturally that with a slouch of his shoulders and a judicious application of layers, he could hide it with little worry.

But it wouldn’t be that way for long. Things like this—BabiesPEOPLEINFANTS— tended to grow at alarming rates. And emptied bellies tended to go flat and hollow quickly in this world.

Is that what he was thinking about? Staring off into nothing? Miscarriages weren’t uncommon here, although willful ones were… She wouldn’t begrudge him that choice if he made it. Though, she thinks, she would mourn it.

How strange, that she would mourn it when the only reason they’d come together in the first place was the reassurance that such a thing as pregnancy was impossible.

“Max?”

He didn’t turn right away, it took a moment, as if he had to shake away layers to climb back to her. His head tilted on his neck, flopped tiredly onto his shoulder and he gazed at her without speaking.

She lifted the bread bowl in her hand, for emphasis. Regardless of what choice he would make considering his… condition. He needed to eat.

He sighed audibly and lifted the hand not touching his belly, took the food when she offered it and sniffed, long and deep. His lips pursed—

He became startlingly pale and thrust it back at her rather roughly. Eyes shut tightly.

“What is it?” She took it back, stood over him curiously; “What’s wrong?”

He wrinkled his nose up, lips pulled into an exaggerated frown—and made a disgusting gagging sound, hand going over his mouth.

Oh, well…

She left the room quickly, “He—he’s sick. What do I do?”

Triumph’s chair scratched against the ground as she settled, and turned to regard Furiosa with a drooping eye; “What you mean sick?”

She thrust the food forward, let Triumph sniff it; “He smelled it, now he’s puking.”

“Ah,” Triumph took it, sniffed again; “Sensitive nose on that one,” A hum, “Garlic? Or the tomato?”

Furiosa peered back into the room, spied Max sitting hunched over a bucket made from an old coffee can, spitting and moaning quietly. She didn’t want to ask.

“Poor duck,” Triumph sat the food down on her chair and leaned on the doorjamb, arms crossed; “Want I should find some potato mash? You need to eat something.”

He groaned louder, spat a gob of bile into the bucket.

“Was it the potato then?”

He shook his head, face contorted, lips and chin wet. He made a stifled sobbing noise and propped his head in his hand.

Furiosa could smell his distress, the sour tinge of sickness, and the too sweet undertones of STRESS and something else—something that caught her in the base of her mind and PULLED.

She’d done this to him… She—she NEEDED to remedy it.

She moved without thinking, ignored Triupmh pulling at her arm and saying ‘no’, strode forward into the room and dropped to sit beside him on the twisted pallet. She fitted her flesh arm around his shoulders and cupped a hand to the back of his neck. She could feel the steel cables of his muscles and tendons, smell the slick of sour sweat and alpha—she dug her fingers in, running on instinct more than anything, kneading at that place between his shoulder blades and up the back of his neck into the soft wisps of hair on his nape. Scritched her nails gently against his scalp, and again when he moaned and leaned back into the pressure of her hand.

Triumph watched mutedly, sucking on her teeth. She was nervous. That much was obvious from more than her scent. Male Alphas had always followed a certain set of rules, as far as she knew, the fact that this one—This Fool of Furiosa’s did not, made her skin itch in curiosity. There was no reason he should be the way he was, Alphas, even female ones, were raised to pretty much take what they wanted and do what pleased them. This one… This one was wary like an Omega, and keenly intelligent like a Beta. Maybe he was Twisted after all… Maybe everything she’d known about Alphas before had been things they had been taught to be, not what they actually WERE.

There had been times, long ago with her own mate, when Triumph had bared her teeth and snarled—not because she wanted to, but because the world expected her to. There had been times when she’d rebuked affections even when something cried from within her to embrace them.

Fool—MAX, followed no such social customs. He simply was himself in all the innate, unfettered glory of an Alpha. He snarled and growled when he felt threatened, not because he knew the world expected him to. He leaned into Furiosa’s touch because he felt comforted by it, not away to appear strong. He let Furiosa pet over his head and nuzzle his cheek and scent him because it made him feel secure, he wasn’t worried at all what anybody else would think finding Omega all over him in places that had nothing to do with breeding. For all Triumph knew, he wanted people to smell her contentment and caring on him. Wanted others to smell his trust on her.

“Well, damn…” Triumph crossed her arms high over her chest and let out a sigh of disbelief.

There were stories, there always were, of True Mates, and all that tosh. But it was something else entirely to see it happening right in front of you. A Mating without struggle, or fear, or pain. No bite scars, no exchanged marks. Just a mingling of scents and emotions.

It reminded Triumph of the old library back where she’d been a small child, before they’d moved onto the big greens. A sweet, homey scent she couldn’t describe that lingered in the back of her mind like a half-forgotten dream.

People like this… People like them, could do anything.

Max cleaned his face with a shaking hand, wiped it on the edge of the pallet, another stain amongst many, sighed and twisted, bumped his brow against her shoulder with a shuddering breath. Furiosa rubbed until her fingertips went numb, until her wrist started to cramp, and kept going. Felt driven by something other. Some NEED she had no way to name.

And then Max lifted his head, blinked down at her lap; “What’s that?”

She looked, because she didn’t know what he was talking about—had completely forgotten what was clutched in her mechanical hand. “Oh,” She lifted it, twisted her arm so the fingers uncurled; “Apple… Capable sent it for you… If you want it.”

It was about the size of his fist, red on one side, greenish on the other with thick skin. He took it, turned it this way and that with a hand set atremble, and wiped at his mouth again.

Was he still sick? Should she take it back?”

He pressed his nose to it, sniffed, and then tried to shove the whole thing into his mouth at once with a wonton sounding groan. Cradled the fruit in both hands and made wet, excited sounding rumbles as he chewed.

Furiosa watched, a grin half formed on her face. She’d seen similar reactions in Pups and Once-Wretched the first time they’d had a piece of fruit. Enjoyment so palpable it bordered on sexual. She’s pretty sure she’d heard him make sounds like that when she’d been pinning him to this pallet with her hips and sex.

Triumph made a huffing sound of amusement and turned away.

He finished the bulk of the fruit and started gnawing on the tough core, ate it down to the little seeds and looked up at her with wide blue eyes; “Are—are there more… of those? Apples?”

She hesitated, nodded. “Can your stomach handle more?” She eyed the bucket between his knees and its contents. He didn’t even blink, but his stomach made an urgent snarling noise and he put a hand to it, above the curve pressing outward against his clothes.

“How are your legs?”

He looked down at them, pulled at the leather of his trousers to expose the swollen bits of his left ankle and foot beneath the wrappings. “Hmm,” He said, brows drawing down.

Furiosa pushed to her feet, flexed her fingers, palm downward. “Just stay here… I’ll be back.”

He looked up at her, nodded and pushed the bucket off to the side, leaned back against the edge of the mattress he’d propped against the wall and continued rubbing the edges of his nails against his stomach.

Furiosa hesitated at the door, lips pursed, fingers curled into a fist; “You know… You’d probably be more comfortable in my room.

He looked at her without blinking, then glanced to his foot and back. It hurt to walk. Hurt to stand. Hurt to really do much of anything with all that fluid trapped under his skin. But she was right. There was nothing in here but the pallet, the window and the stale, faded scent of their matings.

He caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth and chewed on it thoughtfully.

But… there were people out there. Dozens of people between himself and her room. Stunted alphas, and betas, not to mention the omegas—omegas who always tried to chat at him, or touch him, or display themselves. It wasn’t their fault, he knew. Maybe he should have stolen some of that scent killing soap from the city in the old ship. The people here would be safe from him if he had.

Stupid. Should have thought before you just ran off. Should have thought before you did a lot of things.

He rubbed a hand over his stomach. Just following biology had never turned out well. People had been hurt because of it, people had died because of it—he’d always been able to control himself before but… but something about—He just stared at Furiosa for a moment, the stained bandage tied to her shoulder. He’d done that. He’d done that out of feral fear. What if he hurt her again? Worse? If he went to her room she wouldn’t be able to escape him if he went into a rage. He could hurt her—hurt both of them—they could kill one another.

He shook his head, huddled a little farther into the corner. This place was safer. A lock on the door to keep others out, and keep him in until his brain had turned over this… this problem—More shifting, MOVEMENT from within—His breath shuddered.

“Max?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes.

She sighed, nodded, and walked away. He could hear her boots all the way down the corridor and onto the sky walk.

Triumph, however, didn’t leave. She stood there with her arms crossed watching him with a sharp eye. “It moving yet?”

He flinched, but said nothing.

“That’s a yes… ‘ever had a pup before?” She reached into one of the pockets on her jacket and pulled out a dried twist of something. Some herb or another and tucked it into her mouth. “’mean, you ever got someone pregnant before?”

A nod. His knees drew up farther.

Triumph hummed, glanced away. “You’re scared of it… ‘ain’t ya.”

He looked at her warily.

She watched him without saying anything for a long time, her face cool and blank. The wrinkles carved into her skin, around her eyes and nose looked like hard lines drawn in sand dunes. Like tire tracks across the wastes. Her eyes flicked, took in different parts of him and he almost wanted to snarl, wanted to defend himself from this intrusive evaluation… but something softened in her eyes. Something pinched at her mouth and she didn’t look like so much of a threat anymore. She just looked concerned and strangely hopeful. Hopeful in that awful, painful way that left you hollowed out and sick when it inevitably didn’t come true. There were no happy endings anymore, he knew that. Hope was a mistake.

But he realized, quite suddenly, that his arms were curled around his belly protectively. He tried to unwind himself, tried to distance himself from the excited little twitches of movement. Fought with this INSTINCT to protect. His vision went wet and he could feel it running down his face in wasteful rivers.

Triumph shifted uncomfortably on her feet. Stared hard at the end of the corridor as if trying to drag Furiosa back with her eyes. She shifted her eyes to him uneasily, and with a muttered curse dropped into a crouch by the door, arms over her knees, head bowed. “You have options… I’ve got herbs that’ll end it in a few hours… It’ll be painful, and bloody, but—“

“No.”

She lifted her head and stared at him curiously. Perhaps stunned.

He shook his head, took a shuddering breath; “I can’t.”

“You know what that means.”

“’could happen on its own… if it does, fine. But I can’t—I can’t. Not on purpose.”

Triumph curled her hands under her chin, fiddled with her braids for want of something to do with her hands. “Still got options… If it happens on its own we’ll deal with it… If it don’t—well,” she pursed her lips and forced herself to speak, “I’ve never seen a pregnant alpha before. I knew it was possible… but I’ve never seen it. You’ve got the same parts, so the delivery should be the same, but… You’re not built like an omega. It’ll be hard. It could kill you, and the sprog.”

He swallowed past a lump in his throat. “I know where there’s doctors.”

Triumph’s head lifted. “Sonny, I was tutored by the last of them. I’m the closest to a doctor you’re gonna get.”

He shook his head and breathed slowly; “On the salts… there’s a ship—a big metal city. They’ve got doctors. I’ve been there.”

Triumph’s eyes widened. “There’s ships?”

“Locked in the sand.”

She looked back toward the corridor, shuffled a little closer to him; “Are they reliable?”

He shrugged one shoulder toward his ear.

She nodded. “We could send out a party to converse with them.”

“They’re armed. Heavy armed. Armor piercing rounds.”

Triumph straightened. “Then we’ll politick ‘em.”

Max looked back to the window.

Triumph sighed, scratched her throat; “I guess this means you’ve made your choice.”

He brushed his thumb against the taut skin of his belly but didn’t say anything. Eventually the old alpha got the point and shuffled away again.

It took Furiosa a long time to come back. Long enough that the sun slid a good six inches across the floor. But when she did she had more than a few apples with her.

There was a chair made of old pipes with strips of tire woven through to make a seat. And a lamp with a frayed cord much longer than should have been that she stretched out into the corridor to connect to a socket in the wall.

It cast the little room in warm tones where the fading sun couldn’t reach.

Max ate four more apples in silence and Furiosa just sat there watching him, sharpening her knives. The sound of her spitting on the whet stone turned his stomach, but she finished quickly and put it away, so he said nothing.

Once the sun sank Max struggled to his feet, took a piss in the corner sand pot and shuffled around the perimeter of the room a few times. Wincing at the sting in his legs and feet.

“You need to stay off them,” Furiosa said, slouched as she was in her seat watching him.

He ignored her, found a bit of quartz in the far wall and picked at it. Gave up when it wouldn’t come free and continued his circuit.

Furiosa glanced at the window then climbed to her feet. “You need more to eat than just apples,” She stretched her arms over her head, the mechanical one whirring. “Feel like taking a walk?”

He did… But his feet didn’t. He looked down at them. Toes puffy where they protruded from the wrappings. They looked like idiots.

Furiosa didn’t seem to mind, extended her hand and waited for him to take it, or to crawl back onto the pallet in the corner.

He didn’t move right away, stood there with a hand on his stomach, hunched forward, and considered it. Turned everything over in his head like some of the people who came for trade did their payment offers.

“Most everyone’s gone to bed. Just a few sentries and sleepless pups.”

“And the Night Mothers,” Triumph put in helpfully. “But you won’t be heading near the wards, so no need to worry about them just yet.”

Max met her eyes and let out a sigh. He seemed to deflate a little, in relief of resignation she couldn’t tell, but he took her hand. Curled his crooked fingers around hers and limped out of the room after her. Triumph was sitting in her chair again, cocked back on the rear legs, working at a piece of fruit with the blade of her knife. She looked up, surprised when Max appeared, but said next to nothing, just a curious;

“Shouldn’t he be resting?”

To which, Furiosa replied; “We’ll be back.”

Triumph grunted, and turned back to her pear.

There were only two people in the kitchens. Kockah, a once wretched man with dark skin, one eye and a head of long whitening knobby locks. He called the kitchens His, and with him was his daughter, a young beta named Posey who said ‘weesheff’ every time he told her to do something.

Kockah lifted his head when Max came into the room and sniffed loudly, turned and locked his lone eye on him. He pointed a knife at Max and spoke low in his throat. “What the hell do you want?”

Furiosa, at first thought it was a threat, and tried to put herself between them, but Max’s head lifted, sniffing. “Food.”

Kockah blinked and lowered the knife, mouth curling up into a wicked grin; “Alright then, come here,” and he shouted something unintelligible at Posey.

Furiosa offered herself as a kind of crutch as Max limped into the kitchens. He sat when Kockah pushed a chair at him and watched as the man started working at a bubbling pot set over a guzzoline burner. Kockah threw in this, and that, and minced some leafy greens Max couldn’t name.

Furiosa stayed behind the chair, hand moving slowly at the nape of Max’s neck.

“Here,” Kockah dropped a chopping block in front of Max and slapped a dark purple potato as wide as Max’s forearm into his hand. “Chop this,” He put a knife down on the block and nudged at Furiosa’s shoulder; “I need oregano,” He pointed to various little mugs and pots and cans setting on a shelf under one of the windows. They were all marked in chalk. “Just the leaves. And a pint of milk. Go.”

“I—“Furiosa hesitated; “I don’t know how to cook.”

“You just pinch them off,” He made a twisting, pinching motion and patted her flesh hand. “Go-go,” And he went back to cutting onions.

Max was watching him silently. Slowly cutting the potato into precise little chunks. He felt absurd. Last time he’d had a potato he’d just stuck it in the sand under where he’d built his fire. It came out cooked through, and hot and almost tasteless. He discretely popped a piece in his mouth raw and chewed. Much better raw.

“That’s good,” Kockah snatched up the chop block and dumped the potato chunks into the water. Max almost whined.

“Try this,” Posey thrust something under his nose. It was about the size of the space left when he pressed his thumb to the end of his middle finger and thick as his hand. Topped with bits of green and red and some kind of yellowish paste. He sniffed it, damned thing felt delicate and light and… and flaky between his fingers. It smelled—fruity. It—Another sniff and he looked Posey in the eye, then popped it whole into his mouth and gave a hesitant crunch with his teeth—

Pastry.

Pastry filled with custard and topped in cucumber and strawberry and sweet cream. His eyes closed and his lips sealed hard.

Furiosa put a hand on his shoulder; “Max?” She looked around, “Do you need a bucket?”

He sighed, and seemed to go boneless, chewing slowly.

“Eh, good?” Posey had one corner of her mouth ticked up. “Good,” And she turned back to what she was doing.

“What was that?” Furiosa motioned to Max’s stupid face.

Posey grinned; “Oat grount’ down with honey and butter—“

“You have butter?” Max spoke around the treat, eyes still closed. “You can make butter?”

Kockah nodded, “’s goat butter. Scav’ came through about six Turns ago with five of ‘em. Traded for food and a room… He works’ the aqua-ponics now. Good man. We got strawsburries now because of him.”

“You fancy him,” Posey said with a sly grin. “Don’t deny it.”

Kockah flapped a hand at her dismissively and muttered in a different language.

Furiosa asked, as cautiously as she could what they were preparing, mentioned that Max had a 'sensitive stomach' and left it at that.

“Potato soup,” Kockah motioned to a second pot in the back corner of the room, “Chicken soup.”

“Chicken?” Furiosa looked up warily. They only had so many chickens. “What happened?” She found a stack of stray bread bowls and brought them to Posey, let her spill some of the stew inside and set one front of Max with one of the mashed spoons they kept in cans by the door.

“Black chicken,” Posey said. Across the room Kockah made a rough cawing noise in the back of his throat and cackled.

“Crow soup?” Max’s spoon hovered over it.

“Better than dog soup,” Kockah met him with his one eye, then turned to Furiosa, “Enough for the morning meal round, and the meat’s going into a stew for evening meal,” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to a big pot on another burner in the corner, “Spicy stew.”

“Spicy!” Posey echoed and took the bowl of tomato she had been chopping and slid it all into the pot.

“Needs onion… No corn. No goat. Goat meat’s too—”

Max made a stifled gagging noise and Kockah looked at him with a brow lifted in disdain.

“You not like my cookin’?” Kockah peered down his nose.

Max pressed his head into his hand and spoke slowly, eyes closed. Nostrils flared; “Goat… Not goat.”

Furiosa filed this away for later.

Kockah blinked at him slowly, eyes sliding up from Max’s bound feet to the tuft of hair on the crown of his head. He met Furiosa’s eyes evenly once he was finished with his appraisal, held her gaze for moments too long.

Furiosa felt as if he could see through her. It made her feel strangely, and inexplicably violent. She wanted to snap, wanted to ask him what he thought was so interesting. Wanted to defend herself, and by extension, Max. But she quashed it. Took a deep breath and tried to ignore it.

He couldn’t know.

It wasn’t possible. Nobody would even suspect it. Alphas didn’t get pregnant, and if they happened to, it wasn’t by Omegas. It was by other Alphas, or Betas. As far as everyone else was concerned, Omegas could only GET pregnant, not MAKE someone pregnant.

Pregnant, PREGNANTPREGNANT! Max was going to have a baby and it wouldn’t be long until someone figured it out. Maybe Kockah already had. Maybe—Maybe nobody would. Maybe he wouldn’t keep it.

Furiosa’s spoon faltered on its way to her mouth and she sat it down, had to breathe deeply to keep a tremor out of her body.

Max had finished eating the soupy portion of his stew and had folded the bread bowl in half, was taking large, indelicate bites and chewing only minimally before he swallowed. Furiosa was surprised he didn’t choke.

Posey found it amusing, from the way she chuckled. But Kockah had retreated to the far side of the kitchen and was watching from the edge of his vision as he worked over the ‘Chicken’ stew, his one eye keen and somehow harsh as he watched Max finish his meal and stack some of the pastries with cucumber and strawberry in the crooked curl of his hand. Hoarding them against his chest.

Furiosa took one of the little… she wasn’t sure what to call them. ‘Sweeties’ Posey supplied while she was chewing. She watched Max hide his in a pocket… Or maybe he’d eaten them all at once, cheeks pooched out, crumbs on his chin and lips.

It was a long, slow walk back to the room above the garages, hand on his bad leg to support it. Furiosa promised to fetch his brace for the morning, and they said little else.

The sky was dark and cloudless above them on the sky walk. A great disk of glittering stars. The Sentinel guards changed on the desert floor. Some of the People Below had a small fire going and were still awake, speaking in hushed tones, telling tales.

Gas Town was a blur of smog and amber lights at the end of the last road. And the Bullet Farm was a dim glow on the horizon to the East.

Max paused near the end of the sky walk, close enough to the opening in the stone that he could see Triumph had abandoned her post by the door. He pressed his hands to the wobbling railing and peered down at the desert floor, eyes wide and somehow nervous.

Furiosa stepped up close, hooked her arm through his and pulled a little, some dark part of her mind worried that he was about to throw himself over. Or that his bad leg may give out and he could fall.

He didn’t flinch, but leaned into her a fraction—warm and solid and unyielding. The thick curve of his shoulder settling against hers.

“Max?”

He said nothing, just motioned with his eyes to a group of people around a small fire. A craggy man was on his feet making broad gestures. He looked little more than an ant from this height, but they could hear the dull rhythm of his voice echoing around the stones.

Furiosa nodded; “A history man… They share tales every night. Capable’s probably down there. She loves the stories.”

Max hummed and his gaze turned inward, hand lifting from the rail to curve against his stomach.

A wind came through, high and dry and chilled with the night. Furiosa felt him shiver. “Come on… You need to get off your feet.”

He didn’t move.

“What is it?”

He grunted, flexed his hand against his middle.

“Are you going to be sick?”

His brows scrunched in the negative and he let out a sigh, like a dune shifting.

Furiosa’s throat felt tight; “Is it moving again?”

A fraction of a nod.

She stared at his hand, heart beating hard. Fear and wonder and hope—

His shoulders came up defensively; “I can’t hurt it.”

“You said that already.”

His head turned, eyes big and dark in the moonlight. Shining like broken glass.

She took a breath and let it out; “You want to keep it.”

His mouth opened and closed, then seemed to disappear into his face, just a thin, fearful line. His throat made a funny choking noise and he turned his face away.

“There are mothers here who can take it if you can’t… It’s your child—“

“And yours.”

It hurt a little, in her chest. An ache worse than fear and hope and need.

“You could,” He made a wagging gesture with a crooked finger between them,”—could take it.”

“I’m not a mother, Max, I don’t know how to be a mother. I don’t know what I—“ She hesitated, bowed her head against his temple. “I could hurt it… without even trying… The things I’ve done—“ Her eyes overflowed.

He turned, cheek to cheek, hand lifting to press against her nape. He could smell the fear on her mixed with his own. Feel the rapid twitches from within in response to it. The faster his heart beat, the harder, and faster—

She clung to him, her arms around his shoulders, pulling his head to her chest and he went, uncertainty melting. Something warmed in his chest. A hollow he’d thought burned black brightened.

_It doesn’t matter. None of it—what we’ve done, what we haven’t—We will fix it. We can do better. We can save this—_

It burned like acid because he had seen it spoiled, seen hopes dashed and ravaged and cut down on the road. But there it was, bubbling and shifting and alive, and as much as it hurt to surrender to it, as much as black certainty ate at him from the soul out, he couldn’t resist it. Shivered and pulled her scent over the pores in the roof of his mouth, whined and exposed his throat.

Her flesh hand shifted, fingers delving deep into his hair and he remembered the taste of her blood, could smell it under the bandage on her shoulder.

She pressed her lips to the flesh behind his ear, breathed in the concentrated scent of him and felt his mouth brush the painful mark he’d left on her shoulder. Tenderness, an apology. They melted into one another, broken edges finding home on foreign ground.

“I want it—“ He shuddered, breath warm and almost a sob against her neck. “I want it safe and—and SAFE but it’s not—it’ll never be safe.“

“Max—“ She kissed the edge of his mouth; “—It’s safe… You’re safe too—“

“The world’s not safe—It—it’s awful. Fulla’ m-murder and h-hate an—“ He twisted, tried to get away—there was blood on his hands—clean hands, but he could FEEL every life he’d taken slick and hot and damning under his skin. She drew him back again with just the subtle gravity of her eyes and scent.

His hands tightened, fingers curled into rigid claws, face pressed tight to her chest—He snarled. A low, threatening ALPHA sound that shook something in Furiosa’s core. Her hand curled against the back of his neck. Not restraining, not threatening. Just a gentle weight of her palm and fingers.

Max went still, breathing hard, hands fisted in her shirt.

She spoke slowly, carefully because she could feel how fragile he was in his fear and sadness. Felt it herself if she was being honest. “It doesn’t have to be,” She nuzzled into his throat, scenting him, gentling his head up to look at her. “See that down there?” She nudged him again, watched his face, solemn and heartbroken as it was, peer over the edge of the skywalk.

From below came the sound of voices raised from one corner or another. Singing. Distant laughter.

“We helped do that,” She caught his hand between her own and his stomach, right over the core of the movement, as if she knew, could feel it too. “And we can do this.”

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0


	7. Day 70-80

0-0-0

0-0-0

0-0-0

She guided him back into their hidden room by the hand, pushed the door shut and pressed his back against it while she worked the lock, tilted up her chin to meet him, just a gentle, hesitant brush of lips. 

Between them his stomach was warm, proud beneath his shirt. Her flesh hand slid down his chest and smoothed against the curve of it. She paused to look at it, hesitancy clear in the tension of her jaw and shoulders. Then she moved on. 

He watched her, curious but not wary as he had been when he’d shown her the first time. His breath caught, hands limp and loose at his sides. Let her ruck his shirt up and curled his fingers into the leather of his trousers when she sank down and pressed her lips to his stomach, just above the string holding them up. 

He shivered, all too aware that the kiss— yes, that’s what it was—wasn’t entirely for him, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Her teeth grazed each of his hipbones in turn and he sank slowly to the ground to meet her, bowed his face into her shoulder looking for some kind of anchor when her fingers pushed into the gap, chilled and firm—untied hasty knots and dragged him out into the air. 

He wanted to touch her back, because hearing her voice raised in pleasure was the best thing he believed he’d ever heard. But she made a shushing sound and drew the fleshy bit of his ear between her lips and sucked on it. “Let me,” She whispered, voice rough and low in urgency, “Let me.”

He had no control over what happened after that, and was glad or it. Wrapped his arms around her neck and drew her close, fitted his lips against her own and borrowed her air. Felt her grinning into each kiss, each gasp and moan. 

He bared his neck again and she grazed his clavicle with her teeth, scraped them up to the sensitive glands behind his ears and growled encouragement until he was spent and struggling for breath. Pulled him to the pallet and tucked him against herself. Metal arm discarded in her chair, the lamp warm and low in the corner. 

He slept, didn’t dream, and woke with a blanket thrown over him and Furiosa’s scent clinging to his skin, the phantom sensation of her lips and teeth against his throat, hips and the swell of his stomach.

We helped do that. She’d said. 

And we can do this.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the rough stone ceiling, fit both hands on either side of his midriff and pushed out a breath like a storm gale, sinuses burning, chest growing tight with hope.

“Okay.”

0-0-0

Within three days the swelling in his feet and left leg has gone down. The brace fit snuggly around his knee once more. He’s become restless, walks the perimeter of the room multiple times and finds himself stopping by that bit of quartz and scratching at it with the dull edge of his knife until it comes free, and then—aside from Furiosa’s daily visits—the room loses all interest. 

He feels caged, and he knows his mood is far less than grateful when Furiosa appears with his meals. He’s started to notice that she’s giving him more food than she, or Triumph get and part of that makes him irritable. 

He tries to foist part of it onto her, but she won’t take it—and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t want it. He can’t seem to eat enough, and even if he eats until his stomach feels full, within an hour or two the hunger has returned. 

He’ll eat the porridge, he’ll eat the greens and stews… but the fruit, and the little sweets Posey sends up on occasion, he can’t get enough of those. 

By the seventh day the restlessness and hunger have evolved into something else. Something like rage and panic and unease. He scratches his neck red and bloody in places, rubs his palms on the sides of his trousers until his palms go pale. Paces back and forth, back and forth until there’s a path in the dust on the floor. 

Furiosa finds him sitting in the corner with his head tilted back breathing hard at mid-day. Triumph hadn’t dared go in, said Max may have attacked her. 

He seems to relax by inches when Furiosa sits beside him, lets him grip her hand like a vice. 

He doesn’t want anyone else to know, he’s afraid of what they would think and do, but he can’t stand to be shut up in this room for a moment longer. It doesn’t feel safe right now, it feels like a prison. 

Furiosa can tell. She feels it under her skin like electricity.

“The girls have been asking about you… They’ve been conspiring to come find you if you don’t make an appearance.” 

He has sweat beading on his brow and between the little hairs on his upper lip. He swallows convulsively, eyes still on the ceiling and shakes his head. “Can’t—Not—Not in my head right now.” 

She watches him, lets him grip her hand and hums reassuringly when his eyes squeeze closed and shudders run through him. 

“We could go up top. There’s nothing but goats and chickens up there.”

It’s a people thing, she gets it. He’s been shut up in here for days now with only Furiosa herself and Triumph for company, and though it may be more than what he usually gets out there in the world, there are hundreds of people here, and a dozen or more who would rush up to Max and start chatting and crowding him if they saw him. But he can’t leave. Not in this condition. Not pregnant and unpredictable. 

He nods, a jerking, uncomfortable motion and lets her pull him to his feet. He practically hides in her shadow as she leads him out the door and up the narrow staircase to the clifftop. 

There’s a metal gate over the tunnel mouth. Bars and chains to keep the goats from escaping. It’s bad enough they like to strand themselves on the impossible ledges on the sides of the butte, only two have fallen, or been knocked off since they’d become part of the Citadel’s little ‘farm’. And Furiosa isn’t entirely convinced one of the goats wasn’t purposefully knocking the young Billies over the edge. 

That black one seemed to have a wild hair. Part of her wanted to eat him.

Thankfully, however, the goats weren’t too close to the doors, and Furiosa led Max out onto the green. It was tiered like the others, but composed primarily of grasses and prickly conifer trees whose sap was used to make glue and explosives. 

The goats liked to climb in them and shit all over the place. And the chickens liked to hide in the upper branches and try to nest, every so often some of the Greenies would come over and scale the trees to raid the rogue nests for eggs under the promise of two whole eggs for themselves. 

An egg to do with what you choose was a rare thing. Some of the pups had managed to hatch one, others traded theirs away to the people on the desert floor for chunks of quartz and precious stones they could take to the artisans and have made into shiny things. 

Furiosa knew of at least two rogue chickens hatched by pups that nested in the garages. Some of the boys had begun painting them on their cars over the chipped and faded skulls and daubing the tips of wing feathers in red and yellow and bright pink. 

Max wandered around quietly for a long while, Furiosa let him go where he pleased, but he didn’t seem to go so far away that she couldn’t see him, or he wouldn’t be able to hear if she called to him. 

Every so often the wind shifted and she could hear him mumbling as he walked, kicked a stone, or stood there with his hands on his hips and his shoulders back with the wind catching the stretched lower hem of his shirt and pulling it tight over his stomach. 

Yes, it wouldn’t be long now until he wouldn’t be able to hide it at all. When he was standing there as straight as he could feeling the wind blowing up his sleeves and through his hair you could see it. The not so subtle curve of his stomach—of their child.

Their child…

She swallowed past a tight feeling in her throat, watched him crouch to pick at something or another, muttering to himself. He rubbed his face on his sleeve and pitched a few little rocks down the slope of the tower, watched them bounce and startle a few hens and their broods. Somewhere out of Furiosa’s sight a goat bleated for her kid. 

Furiosa wasn’t sure what she wanted to happen. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit to the fact that she wasn’t sure what she thought of the child Max was carrying. This impossible baby they’d created. 

Babies were… they were scary. 

Tiny fragile things when they were born. Pushed out of their parents bodies slick with blood and mucus. 

Furiosa had seen mothers die during birth, had seen children come out still and blue and misshapen. Seen little bodies, perfect in every way still come out lifeless. 

Then again, she had seen babies of every size and shape born and live. THRIVE.

Maybe it was the uncertainty of it. The fact that she didn’t know if the baby Max was carrying would survive. Maybe that was why she couldn’t bring herself to accept it, or hope for it—or want it any more than as a dream. 

Maybe she was afraid to want it because if it didn’t live she would have to bury someone she loved all over again. A someone she hadn’t even gotten the chance to know. 

What would that do to Max?

What would happen to him if…

She rubbed at a twinge of pain in the back of her neck, some muscle pulled tight by stress and strain. Took a deep breath and let it out. 

Max wandered back over to her some time later, long enough for her to have changed position a few times and threatened a rooster with her boot.

The chickens and goats were beginning to circle toward the doorways and Furiosa gauged the time by the position of the sun relative to the mountains. “They’ll be coming up with food soon, we should go.”

Max nodded and swung his jacket back on, body seeming to fold in on itself, hiding the proof of his condition nigh seamlessly. As long as nobody noticed his trousers were held closed by loops of string there would be no knowing. 

Sure enough they’d no sooner made it down the stair into the main corridor than a group of three middling age children came in off the skywalk carrying pails of food for the animals.

Max clamped a hand over his mouth and nose as they passed and with Furiosa tugging on his wrist hurried down the corridor and onto the skywalk, leaning on the rail to breathe without the smell of it. Kitchen refuse and garden waste mostly. 

“Don’t sick there,” Furiosa tugged on his arm, “You’ll splatter right on the history man’s roof.”

Max made a half gagging, half laughing sound. It was awkward and not really an attractive noise, but it chased away the nausea. 

Somehow, working one’s way across the sky walk during the day was worse than doing it at night. Max had his eyes cast straight ahead and slightly lifted, one hand on each railing. He could feel each footstep, the gusts of the wind between the two towers. 

And in front of him Furiosa walked as if she weren’t trusting her life to rusted steel and poor welding. She did so every day to come see him. 

Half-way across Max felt the sky walk judder beneath him and nearly went to his knees from imagined instability. He knew the damned thing was going to fold, twist and dump him right into the little rocky canyon between the garage tower and the electric tower. He knew it. FELT IT IN HIS BONES.

Even the little one inside him jumped and squirmed along with him. 

“Are you alright?” Furiosa had paused was staring at him with one brow lifted. 

He didn’t dare look downward. Just steel grating between him and the abyss. 

Why was it bothering him now? He hadn’t given it a second thought before, stumbling and growling on the cusp of Rut with Furiosa pulling him along. 

He’d practically wrestled with her here on this very bridge. Had his arms around her waist from behind, scenting her and rubbing the solidity of his want against the back of her thigh. 

How had he not seen how perilous this was!

“Come on,” Furiosa motioned to him, then again when he just stood there staring at her. “Come on.” 

He swallowed a hard lump in his throat, past the dryness of his mouth, and shuffled forward. 

Every step was closer to solid ground and he nearly fainted in relief when they made it, took a deliberate five steps away from the opening in the rock to make sure there was no chance he could fall if the bridge gave way. 

Furiosa put her fingers against his elbow; “Are you alright? You—“ She wrinkled her nose; “You’re sour.”

He bent forward a bit, hands on his thighs and breathed slowly, hoping to calm the stink of himself; “Are there stairs?”

“What? Over there?” She motioned vaguely in the direction of the garage tower. “You want to climb stairs instead of just going over?”

He didn’t nod, just stared at his boots.

She made a huffing noise, air blown out quickly; “That’s over a thousand stairs, you know that, right? As opposed to sixty feet over the walk. A thousand stairs, and that’s just up. It’s another eight-hundred or more to go down from here.”

“Stairs,” A shaking breath, “Stairs are good.”

“Stairs’ll kill you,” She bent forward a little to catch his gaze, lowered her voice; “You’re only going to get bigger if it sticks… It’ll get harder and harder to take the stairs every day.”

He looked at her, silent save the sound of his breathing then groaned and let his head drop forward on his neck.

“You could always stay in my room… It’s only a couple hundred feet from the kitchens. And only a little farther to the Wards.”

He ground his teeth, gave the sky walk another long, half terrified look, and nodded.

Furiosa’s room was almost exactly how Max remembered it. She had collected a few more plants and her window was bigger, had actual glass in it this time instead of a rag curtain. The stone around it was still pale and sharp looking and he ran his fingers over it seeing the little mounds of concrete holding the glass and frame in place.

“It opens,” Furiosa stepped up to his side and pulled on a handle at the top of the window, the top pane screeched a little and angled itself outward. She was grinning proudly. “Found it in a trader’s menagerie, he had four of them… I—“ She rubbed her head self-consciously and motioned to the space under her work bench. “There aren’t many windows here that open that aren’t on cars.”

Max slipped his fingers out into open air through the window and hummed in agreement. It was nice. Kept out the dust and wind when you didn’t want them, and let in the breeze when you did. “Keeps out snakes.”

Furiosa grinned and tugged on his sleeve, “He had other things too, look.”

There was a small delicate box lined with worn blue velvet, Furiosa had packed an assortment of sharp precision blades into the folds, little nuts and bolts in each square partition, little wrenches and screw drivers in the drawer on the bottom. There were old pictures stuck to the top of the box, a cartoon cat, something sparkly and green that looked like an insect Max couldn’t remember the name of, little rainbows and flowers. And in the lid was a mirror, not cracked or chipped at all, held in with tiny, ornate brackets on each corner. 

“And this,” Furiosa pulled over what looked like an old plastic comb with some of the teeth missing, the kind a person may use to pin their hair up in some ornate way. Furiosa thumbed at the flower on the center and up popped a shiny little blade, she was grinning broadly, “It was gummed up, but I worked it loose.” 

Max took it when she handed it over, thumbed the blade up and down a few times, then sat it aside. Found himself staring at something in the corner of Furiosa’s room, hiden under half of a tarp. “Whassat?”

She hesitated, scent tinged a little sour in worry, but it faded quickly. “It’s broken I’ve been working on it, but I—I don’t think it’s repairable.”

He grunted, uninterested and turned back to admiring the little toolbox with the blue velvet inside. 

“Furiosa?” The door cracked open.

Max’s head whipped around to stare, body curling inward protectively. 

Furiosa leapt at the door and managed to stop it opening before someone was able to slip through. “Yes?”

“Tooey said she saw you bringing Max down, is he OK?”

He recognized the voice. Capable. Likely not alone, the Sisters tended to travel in packs.

“He’s fine.”

“Can we see him?” Cheedo said plaintively; “She said he still looked sick.”

“If he’s sick you definitely don’t want to see him, he could be contagious,” Furiosa tried to scare them off.

“But you’re with him, so he can’t be contagious or you’d be sick too.”

“Is it a bad kind of sick?” Cheedo said carefully; “Tooey and I have been reading the medical books… They talked about cancers and auty—“

“Auto-immune diseases,” A new voice, must be Tooey.

Furiosa glanced worriedly over her shoulder at him, then back to the girls; “He’s fine.”

“Is he still feral? The books said there were herbs that could ease a rage.”

Furiosa sighed, “He’s not feral anymore… It was just—he was just confused.”

“The books also said that being separated from a mate during rut can affect an Alpha’s state of mind!”

“We’re not mates,” Furiosa said calmly.

“But—“

“Hush, Tooey!” Capable said gently, “She said they’re not, so they’re not.”

“So, if he’s not feral, and he’s not raging… can we see him?” Cheedo’s voice was pitched innocently.

Max shuffled away from the bed, out of sight of the door, made himself cough pathetically—and loudly—in an attempt to scare them off. What would they think if they saw him? Cheedo was an omega, she would know. She would be able to smell it on him. Omegas had a more keen sense of smell than Betas and sometimes even Alphas. She, he didn’t doubt, would know just with one whiff of him. 

Furiosa glanced over her shoulder worriedly, but calmed the instant she saw he was faking, turned back to the girls; “He’s sick.”

“I thought you said he was OK?”

“He’s… got a cough, from the dust storms.”

“I can make tea, to help with his cough,“ Capable said evenly, “Dag and I grew cat mint and hyssop.” 

“Tooey and I can help,” Cheedo sounded excited. “I have a listening thing all my own now! Maybe he’s got pneumonia, or silicosis!” 

The edge of Furiosa’s eye caught his and Max shook his head. It was inevitable that they would find out—Furiosa was right when she’d said he would only get bigger, but that day didn’t have to be today.

“He’s tired,” Furiosa nudged the door, “Come back later.”

Come back later, she regretted it almost as soon as she’d said it, but she knew if she didn’t give them something, they would keep talking, keep saying how they could help. They cared, and maybe that was why she was so reluctant to let them in. 

They cared about Max, cared about her as well. But if they knew what had happened, what condition Max was truly in, would they forgive her for it?

Would they be able to see anything other than force behind it?

Furiosa closed the door and leaned against it, rubbed her brow tiredly. Not even time for the evening meal and she was already exhausted. 

Max rubbed his neck; “I’m sorry—“

“For what?”

He motioned to the door. 

Furiosa nodded and looked at him long and hard, “You won’t be able to hide it much longer… You need to decide what you’re going to do.”

Max laced his fingers together, twisted them this way and that. He let out a sigh and sat heavily on the stool at Furiosa’s work bench, scratched a bit of the hair south of his navel. “Already decided,” He can’t exactly look at her, mostly because the idea of it scares him, but partly because he thinks looking at her—seeing her face when he says it, could make him regret the decision.

She swallowed with a measure of difficulty. “Okay.”

He hummed, fiddled with the string holding his trousers closed. “Think I’ll need a longer string.” 

She said nothing for a long while, and what she did say then was with the motion and scent of her body, not words. Her shoulders sagged and something light enveloped her, citrus and sweet. 

He looked at her then, saw how she’d clenched her flesh hand and mechanical one into fists, as if to squeeze down the force of her relief. 

“I—“ He cleared his throat, “I don’t know about after… but I’m not going to stop it from—“ He made a motion between his knees, pushed his hand away from his body. He shook a little; “I don’t—don’t know if I can be…” He gave a shiver, “I don’t know if I can do anything more than that.”

Furiosa nodded, pinched her lower lip between her teeth, “If you can’t, I know someone who will.”

Max looked at her, “What about you?”

She looked at the floor, shrugged one shoulder toward her ear; “I wouldn’t be a good mother, Max… I’ve seen too much.”

“That’s what would make you good at it.”

She stares at him; “I wouldn’t know where to begin—If it starts crying I might just—just scream at it!”

“But you want to.”

She looked away, then back again, sighed; “I want to… But I don’t know what to do.”

“Lots of mothers here.”

“But no fathers,” She says it to herself, but he hears it, flinches and focuses on his hands at his middle. Goes tense a moment. Furiosa is opening her mouth to apologize when he speaks, whispers because his voice has no strength past that.

“I don’t know if I can do that again,” He inhales deeply and it comes out on a shiver; “My head’s not right anymore… I-I’m not right anymore,” His eyes close and she sees wet spots on his cheeks.

She moves even before she knows she’s doing it, catches his face in her hand and tilts his chin up. They don’t say anything, nothing really to say. 

She brushes his cheeks dry with her fingertips and breathes hope into him. Hums a song her mother had sung thousands of days ago, before there was horror, and anger, and blood. 

Their hands trace scars, fingers tight on hips and covering scared napes. 

She sheds her clothes like a second skin, steps out of them bare and open and pushes the thought of War Rigs, and black brows, and dead gods out of her mind. Comes to him as a new person, someone she hopes to become as the world is rebuilt around them. 

And hesitantly, afraid, Max follows. Strips himself of leather and armor and blackened heart strings. It hurts, cutting himself out of the ideas he’s had or decades. Pulling at the threads where he’s stitched himself into a foreign shape. Pulling away padding and reinforcements and letting himself be more that the sum of his parts once again. 

It had been nothing like this during their cycles. When their blood and hormones were high and their minds were overtaken by need. 

The closest they can figure they’ve come to this was that first time, when they were both wary but trusting enough to allow themselves to fall together without the influence of heat or rut.

This—this is different. 

His skin burns where she touches, and her own rises in goose bumps when his fingers slip over her shoulder. 

Furiosa straddles his lap and takes him in with a sigh, head tossed back because this isn’t heat, isn’t lust. She bows over him, fingers tangling in his own, thrusts his arm up above his head and relishes in the warmth of him so close, an arm around her waist holding her, his lips and breath against her throat and chin and face, the roll of their bodies together. 

He has no knot, maybe it’s the hormones, the solid fact of life inside him that changes everything, but she throbs and stills and holds him as if they were tied together by the souls. Wound inexorably into one another. She feels the spark of it in every shudder and gasp, bows their brows together and meets his eyes, sees down into him in ways she didn’t think possible. 

She doesn’t bite him, can’t, but the mark is there, she can feel it, he can feel it. 

And that means something more than a scar ever could.

0-0-0

“Is he alive?”

“SHHH!”

“Oh, he smells funny.”

“Be quiet, Cheedo, you’ll wake them up!”

Toast hummed, low and thoughtful, peering around the edge of the door. “He looks alive. ‘s breathing… Furiosa’s all squeezed up against his back though.”

Capable grinned, “I thought so!” She gripped Cheedo’s shoulder eyes wide and glittering. 

“When did they get here? I thought they were still on the Black Tower!” Dag hissed. 

“Yesterday,” Toast spoke softly, twitched the twig between her teeth from one side of her mouth to the other, “Came over when we were working so we wouldn’t see him.”

“But why?”

“Does he not like us anymore?”

“Maybe they wanted to knot all over her room. Mark it up—“

A snort.

They didn’t dare get closer. It was Furiosa’s room, and where it had always been open to them before, now it smelled heavily of Max and Furiosa’s combined scents. A blatant ‘KEEP OUT’ in the intensity of the change. 

“Do you think they’re naked?” Cheedo giggled.

Capable made a shushing sound; “No, look, he’s got his trousers on—“

“Well, he don’t have to exactly take them OFF to knot her, does he!” Toast snorted.

“She’s still dressed too, and besides she came out to get food earlier.”

Dag pulled the door a bit farther open and stared around, picking out everything new, everything Max’s. There wasn’t much. A makeshift crutch, his brace, discarded jacket and shirt, his boots hanging upside down to keep out insects and such alongside Furiosa’s. 

“She was all grins earlier.”

“Maybe they were breeding and he’s all tired out!” Dag said evenly, craned her neck so she could see where Furiosa’s stump curled under Max’s arm and across his bare chest. 

“No, she’s dressed,” Capable hissed.

Toast grinned, “Still say they’re mated.” 

“They’re not mated— He bit her ‘cause he was feral. It don’t count.” 

“Not in the right spot either,” Dag said, motioning to the back of her neck, the twisted crescents of scar below her brand. 

“Maybe they did it different,” Cheedo peered up at Dag, “Like the Mothers said… It doesn’t have to be there… And it can’t be violence either. It don’t count if it’s violence,” She turned back to watching the two sleepers.

Dag pushed on the door again, allowing room for all of them to peer in. It was a quiet in there, warm and close feeling. A place they really had no business being now, but curiosity was not something they knew how to ignore. They’d spent the majority of their lives surrounded by ancient books and Miss Giddy’s stories and tales about the Before Times. They’d only ever had to hide their curiosity and questions when in the presence of HIM. 

Max, at least, had never scolded them for questioning. Furiosa had never tried to abbreviate their desire to KNOW. 

But this… this really was, and they knew, something private. 

They’d just not seen Max since he’d gone feral on the lifts and bit Furiosa. 

“He don’t look violent now,” Dag whispered, but she knew the outward appearance wasn’t always an indicator as to the state of one’s mind. “Ugh—“ She wrinkled her nose, “He snores.” 

“So do you,” Cheedo whispered. 

“Yeah, but I don’t do it all mannish.”

Toast made a low, grating, awful sound in the back of her throat and Max twitched violently in his sleep.

The girls pulled against the door, fingers between it and the stone so there wasn’t a sound, Toast kept her eye pressed to the crack. 

Max shifted, scrubbed his face with a scarred palm and settled again. 

They left, knowing Furiosa would not have slept through Max’s twitch, even if Max himself did—unlikely as it was—

“Do you think they’re still in season?”

“No… smelled funny in there.”

Cheedo paused, stared back over her shoulder at the door with her brows pulled down, rubbed her nose then darted after her sisters.

0-0-0

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0-0-0


End file.
